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664 anthony Munday (ca. 1560–1633) and the 1633 Survey of London The final portion of the 1633 Survey of London, written by Anthony Munday, details the reparation and beautification of over a hundred churches in and around London. The original 1598 Survey of London, however, came from the pen of John Stow (1526–1605), whose descriptions of the Elizabethan ecclesiastical cityscape record a post-Reformation legacy of neglect, vandalism, and sacrilege. Stow, whose patrons included the Archbishop of Canterbury, conformed to the new church order, but his picture of it bears nostalgic witness to the losses entailed. The 1633 additions reveal a different scenario. Munday began his update of Stow’s Survey shortly after the latter’s death, publishing his first revised edition in 1618; the second , which includes the chapters reprinted below documenting the massive ecclesiastical renovation projects of the previous two decades, came out just months after Munday’s own death in 1633—the same year that saw the posthumous publication of Herbert’s Temple, Greville’s Caelica, and Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. Particularly in comparison to the clerics who populate most of this volume, Munday had a checkered and precarious career. A Londoner by birth and orphaned young, he trained as a printer, eventually gaining the freedom of both the Drapers’ and Merchant -Taylors’ Companies. During a 1578 trip to the Continent, he entered the Jesuit-run English College in Rome, an experience that became the basis for his 1582 exposé, The English Roman life—one of several violently anti-Catholic tracts Munday wrote during this period—as well as for Munday’s testimony at the 1581 treason trials of various Jesuits (including Campion) who had left the safety of Rome for England. Thereafter Munday was regularly employed by the government in tracking down both clandestine priests and radical puritans. By the early 1580s, however, Munday had also become an actor; and throughout the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, he worked as a writer and translator of romances, and as a staff playwright at the Rose, usually in a collaborative capacity. He had a hand in The Book of Sir Thomas More (ca. 1593), as well as plays on Robin Hood, Oldcastle, and 665 Anthony Munday other staples of English popular history. For reasons unknown, he left the stage in 1602 and began writing civic pageants; almost all Jacobean lord mayor’s shows are his either wholly or in part. However, the work for which he hoped to be remembered—the work his tombstone proclaims—was the revised Survey of London. Shortly before his death, Stow had given Munday the materials he had gathered for a revised edition in the hope that Munday might “proceed in the perfecting” of it (Epist. ded. to the 1618 ed.). Some time thereafter, the Bishop of London, John King, asked Munday to report on the rebuilding of churches and refurbishing of altars taking place throughout London, a major undertaking that required surveying the repairs, monuments, inscriptions, and ornaments of over a hundred parishes. Munday was unable to finish this task in time for the 1618 edition, but for the 1633 edition he updated the information he had previously gathered, so that the final chapters of the 1633 text, although focusing on the latest round of improvements, note changes going back to the early years of James’ reign. [\ These chapters afford the quite startling revelation that the renovation and beautification of the ecclesiastical fabric, at least in London, predated the Laudian ascendancy by more than a decade. (Its beginnings seem rather to coincide with Abbot’s archiepiscopate.) Indeed, the single most un-Protestant item in Munday’s survey bears the date 1617: the stained glass depiction of Jehovah at St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Admittedly, St. Giles, where Roger Manwaring1 had been rector since 1616, seems to have been the sole clearly highchurch parish in London.2 Yet two unmistakably puritan parishes—St. Antholine’s and St. Mildred’s, Breadstreet—also have their full complement of memorials and adornment , including pictorial stained glass; the subjects and style differ widely from those at St. Giles, but by the 1620s the visual anorexia of the Reformation decades has released its hold.3 In the vast majority of the parishes Munday describes, however, the renovations proclaim neither Anglo-Catholic nor political-puritan commitments. Churches get clocks, galleries, pews, pulpit and altar cloths, a churchyard, a steeple, and new paving far more often than carved angels or Armada memorials. Individual bequests likewise resist categorization...

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