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  • The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange
  • Judith Collard
Monteyne, Joseph , The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007; cloth; pp. xiii, 286 ; 76 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9780754660194.

In this book Joseph Monteyne sets out to explore a London-based visual culture – a sense of urban space anchored particularly in the rich visual culture that appeared within the City of London in the Restoration period. Many of these images were produced and distributed in the area around the Royal Exchange, as opposed to more established print shops around St Paul's churchyard. An important site for this distribution was the coffee house. Monteyne explores this material not only through an examination of a range of prints but also through references to diaries, plays, pamphlets and paintings. The perambulations of figures like Samuel Pepys thread their way evocatively across the pages of this book.

The title of this book is misleading. The description 'Early Modern London' is far too vague, given that the focus here is very much on the thirty-year period immediately after the Restoration. While this places a tight and necessary limit on the material examined, it does also mean that a plethora of other material is excluded. The description of the project found on the blurb, with its reference to Wenceslaus Hollar, similarly does not alert the unwary reader to this limitation. Hollar, after all, began his practice in England in 1637. While an author may not have complete control over a book's title, some clue or explanation might have been expected, given the very vagueness of such a term as 'early modern'.

At the same time, this is a very engaging book. The vividness of figures such as Pepys and the complexity of locations and events lighten these pages that might have been weighed down with Monteyne's wide-ranging scholarship. Indeed there are many fascinating and suggestive distractions that the writer alludes to but, alas, does not follow. It is a book anchored very much in the experience of the City of London, as much as on representations of the city, how space is used and how it is evoked in both ephemeral and more enduring visual forms. It is not a monograph on topographical imagery. As part of this project, Monteyne also examines the distribution of such material, and the sites of circulation and discussion.

To explore such an ambitious scheme, Monteyne divides his book into five case studies. These focus both on the major transformative events in the city's history, such as the Plague and the Great Fire of London, as well as the transitory, yet equally memorable moments, at least for its citizens, such as the Frost Fair of 1683-4 and the Solemn Mock Processions of the Pope. For those involved, these experiences transformed both the physical and emotional landscape, shifting [End Page 240] understandings of what it meant to be an inhabitant of London, as opposed to the emerging suburbs or even the City of Westminster.

The first chapter is, however, on the Coffee House. In it Monteyne draws not only on representations of the coffee house, and on contemporary accounts of the relative merits of the beverage itself, but also on the role of such shops in print culture as sites for distribution and for dissenting opinion. He highlights the changing location of the market-place and the growth in importance of the Royal Exchange in Cornhill and how this also changed both the experience and understandings of life in the City. Of course, the Plague and the Fire had even greater impact on the City and its citizens. In both chapters Monteyne examines how the physical environment was transformed as well as how the city and its constituents were defined. Drawing on a range of printed records, for example John Dunstall and John Sellers' broadsheet, Scenes of the Plague in London with statistical breakdown by parish for the years 1625, 1636 and 1665 (1665-66), Monteyne traces differences between neighbourhoods, between the sick and healthy, those who stayed and those who fled...

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