Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Andrew Gordon

J. F. Merritt. Ed. 2001. Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598-1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 305 pp. ISBN 0-521-77346-6. Ł40/$59.95.

Scholars working on early modern London have had repeated cause to be grateful to John Stow for bequeathing to them a work of the richness and detail of the Survey of London. Stow's 'discovery of London' provides an unparalleled resource for the investigation of the urban environment and the cultural practices which animated it. As a text, the Survey enjoyed a considerable afterlife in the hundred and fifty years following the author's final edition of 1603. Revised and expanded at the hands of Anthony Munday in two prestigious editions, it was drawn upon and imitated by the likes of James Howell and Thomas de Laune in the course of the later seventeenth century before John Strype's massively enlarged two-volume edition hit the bookshops in 1720. Despite its importance to the envisioning of London throughout the seventeenth century and beyond, however, there have been relatively few attempts to understand the uses and construction of this textual franchise. Most often plundered for local colour or mined as a source of contemporary comment upon particular sites, the Survey has too often served as a reference work and not an object of study in itself.
In this collection of essays, developed from a conference held in 1998, Julia Merritt has brought together a team of scholars to situate the Londons produced by Stow, Munday and Strype alongside those encountered and attested to by different parties during the period. The age from Stow to Strype witnessed profound transformations in the metropolis, as Merritt notes: '[t]he demographic and economic changes of this timescale are well known, but an approach which asks how Londoners experienced and understood their city over the same period takes us into less familiar territory.' (2) In order to map a selection of mental worlds inhabited by Londoners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the collection is divided into three sections under the rubrics 'Memorializing the City', 'Space, Society and Urban Experience' and 'Inversions, Instability and the City'.
In the first of these sections the Survey itself receives some sustained attention, most notably in the essay by Merritt which examines the fate of Stow's text up to and including Strype's edition. This important piece charts the changing contexts for Stow's model of urban description; its gradual displacement by new forms of writing on the city of the kind which Cynthia Wall has also recently drawn attention to. By the time Strype presented his two-volume version, its generic status had shifted towards that of artefact: 'the updated edition of a celebrated Elizabethan text.' (73) Merritt's piece is valuable in its attention to the Protestant renovations of Stow's work – particularly in exposing Anthony Munday's incorporation of Protestant investment in the city's spiritual life and physical fabric – and this focus on religion is shared with the other contributors in the section. Thus Patrick Collinson underlines the crypto-catholic leanings of Stow's nostalgic antiquarianism via a useful comparison with the strongly Protestant agenda of William Lambarde. In pointing up Stow's backward looking vision of London, Collinson is informed by the landmark article of Ian Archer whose own contribution here investigates Protestant strategies for representing continuities in civic benefaction. The re-shaping of Stow's text by Munday and others takes its place here alongside the negotiation and appropriation of pre-Reformation practises which Archer identifies among the media of urban memorialization.
The middle section centres upon London's shifting demographics and the modulating economies of spatial experience produced in the process. Vanessa Harding's stated aim to confront 'the interplay of verbal description, cartographic mapping, and visual representation' within 'the historiography of London as a built and lived environment' (117) is hampered by a reluctance to explore the historicization of spatial conceptualization. Her comment that 'we [cannot] tell how clearly any seventeenth-century Londoners might have had a panoptic, bird's eye view, image of their city in mind' (121) too easily avoids engagement with the considerable recent work in this field. Far more successful is Harding's exposition of how demographic polarization of east-west and centre-periphery transformed the experience of social spaces such as the parish. Robert Shoemaker is also concerned with social space in an essay entitled 'Gendered spaces' that attempts to recover women's spatial experiences of the city. Although asking some important questions, in the brief space of this essay he fails to articulate a sufficiently nuanced strategy for reading the representation of women in the variety of textual formats selected. Additionally he makes the unfortunate mistake, given the volume's focus, of labelling 'the parish, the unit of analysis adopted by Stow and Strype.' (145) By contrast Tim Hitchcock, in a fluent and suggestive essay, uses contemporary responses to the visibility of beggars in eighteenth-century London as an index to shifting movements in the moralization of beggary. Hitchcock wonderfully illustrates how space can be implicated in these changes, as for example with the new developments of the West End where expanses of railing provided new and relatively unpoliced sites for public begging. The same railings protected many of the increasingly privatized green spaces of the city whose regulation is charted by Laura Williams in the final essay of the section. For Williams this process is linked to the new discursive investment in parks and gardens as wholesome and physically beneficial sites, in contrast to the corrupting degradation of the ever-expanding urban morass.
The final section groups together three essays touching in different ways upon the representation of resistance to civic stability. Peter Lake's contribution surveys pre-Civil-War literature of the city to expose the fears and anxieties which exercized Londoners of the period. His reading of plays and pamphlets targeted at the edification and entertainment of its citizens charts the ways in which 'when contemporaries came to take moral stock of the city, its achievements and dominant attributes, they remained doomed to oscillate from praise to blame and back.' (225) Following this are two more specific investigations of civic disorder. Tim Harris explores the differing strategies used by Whig and Tory in the representation of Restoration crowd action. If this analysis demonstrates the somewhat predictable tendency to discredit popular support when attached to the rival party, the means of legitimization are shown as articulated in more complex manoeuvres with the former emphasising commitment to liberty through parliament and the latter focusing upon notions of duty. Finally, Nigel Smith, the sole non-historian in the collection, provides a stimulating analysis of the conceptual force of fire for the early modern imagination. From an exposition of the immediate horror of fire to the city dweller, Smith develops a cogent typology of its positive and negative deployments in the interpretation of urban experience in which literal and figurative usages collide and inform each other. In a memorable phrase Smith locates fire as an 'anxiety machine' (292) through which an urbanized society represents to itself its own deep seated fears of disruption and cancellation.
Overall then, this collection includes some important essays that illuminate in significant ways the understanding of urban experience in the period. If the Survey is more of a starting point than a shared concern for contributors to the volume, Imagining Early Modern London nevertheless offers a series of useful insights into the representation of urban experiences that can deepen our understanding of both the culture and the resources out of which Stow and his successors shaped their visions of London. It is precisely this dual interest in the city as experienced and as represented – not always a distinction of interest within historians' methodologies – which will enable this book to appeal across disciplinary boundaries. The lack of direct attention to the Survey could be said to question the logic behind the volume's periodization and there is some impression of arbitrariness in the varied date ranges selected for attention, but these are criticisms that might be levelled at many edited collections without affecting their usefulness for the reader. In the burgeoning market of studies focusing on early modern London this volume is a valuable addition.

ANDREW GORDON
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN