Introduction: The Closed Arena and the Open Gate

The sixteenth century was a great age of mapmaking, and among the many surviving examples, city maps are especially common. An aerial view shows us a city, usually fortified, with high church steeples rising majestically above the rooftops and numerous houses crowded tightly together along narrow streets. Around it are hills and forests and fields, in which few buildings or other marks of human settlement can be seen. The city appears as a bounded world, an artifact of man rising up out of the order of nature, rather like the megaliths of the ancient Britons that rise up as from