Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720

by Edited by J. F. Merritt

• ISBN13: 9780521773461
• ISBN10: 0521773466
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The 120 years that separate the first publication of John Stow's famous Survey of London in 1598 from John Strype's enormous new edition of the same work in 1720 witnessed London's transformation into a sprawling augustan metropolis, very different from the compact medieval city so lovingly charted in the pages of Stow. Imagining Early Modern London takes Stow's classic account of the Elizabethan city as a starting point for an examination of how generations of very different Londoners - men and women, antiquaries, merchants, skilled craftsmen, labourers and beggars - experienced and understood the dramatically changing city. A series of interdisciplinary essays explore the ways in which Londoners interpreted and memorialized their past: how individuals located themselves mentally, socially and geographically within the city, and how far the capital's growth was believed to have a moral influence upon its inhabitants.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Notes on the contributors	viii
Acknowledgements	xi
List of abbreviations	xii
Introduction. Perceptions and portrayals of London 1598--1720	1	(26)
J. F. Merritt
MEMORIALIZING THE CITY
John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism	27	(25)
Patrick Collinson
The reshaping of Stow's Survey: Munday, Strype, and the Protestant City	52	(37)
J. F. Merritt
The arts and acts of memorialization in early modern London	89	(28)
Ian W. Archer
SPACE, SOCIETY, AND URBAN EXPERIENCE
City, capital, and metropolis: the changing shape of seventeenth-century London	117	(27)
Vanessa Harding
Gendered spaces: patterns of mobility and perceptions of London's geography, 1660--1750	144	(22)
Robert B. Shoemaker
The publicity of poverty in early eighteenth-century London	166	(19)
Tim Hitchcock
`To recreate and refresh their dulled spirites in the sweet and wholesome ayre': green space and the growth of the city	185	(32)
Laura Williams
INVERSION, INSTABILITY, AND THE CITY
From Troynouvant to Heliogabulus's Rome and back: `order' and its others in the London of John Stow	217	(33)
Peter Lake
Perceptions of the crowd in later Stuart London	250	(23)
Tim Harris
`Making fire': conflagration and religious controversy in seventeenth-century London	273	(21)
Nigel Smith
Index	294