Material London, ca. 1600 (review)

Material London, ca. 1600. Edited by Lena Cowen Orlin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Pp. x + 393. Illus. $65.00 cloth, $26.50 paper.

The essays gathered in this volume originated in a conference on "Material London, ca. 1600" organized by the Folger Institute in the spring of 1995. Like an earlier collection based on a similarly wide-ranging Folger conference, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991), the present volume brings together scholarship from a variety of disciplines. But the range of topics examined--from plays and popular literature, to economic and social history, medicine and fashion, archaeology and architecture--is even broader than that in the predecessor volume. In a manner that is not coincidental, this reflects both the differences between the court and the metropolis as cultural domains and the expansion of literary-historical work across an ever-widening range of early modern cultural materials. An additional impetus for the expansion represented by this particular collection is the currently flourishing state of London studies among a new generation of historians that includes A. L. Beier, Roger Finlay, Vanessa Harding, Joseph P. Ward, Ian Archer, Derek Keene, and John Schofield, the latter three of whom are among the volume's contributors.

Material London offers neither a comprehensive view of the capital nor a definitive research agenda, and it seems unlikely that urban historians will have a great deal to learn from the essays by literary scholars that form a little more than half of the volume. Yet those same literary essays clearly demonstrate the fruitfulness of thinking about literary artifacts in the material contexts of urban life, and the chief value of the volume lies in the questions it raises about how such contexts should be defined and understood. As Lena Cowen Orlin points out in her useful introduction, every element in the collection's title is challenged and complicated by the various contributions. David Harris Sacks, in "London's Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State," shows that London was an overwhelmingly dominant capital and cultural center but, at the same time, merely the foremost in an "archipelago" of towns with their own independent lives and cultures. This picture is further complicated by yet other definitions of the metropolis: as an orderly civic jurisdiction in Ian W. Archer's essay on the values and practices of the merchant community; as a source of exurbation in Patricia Fumerton's study of vagrant mobility and petty marketing and in Alice T. Friedman's study of London goods and fashions in the English country house; as a consumer market driven by a national majority of rural artisans and entrepreneurs in Joan Thirsk's article on London and the provincial economy; and as an entrepôt and international labor market in Derek Keene's essay on "Material London in Time and Space."

Temporal context ("ca. 1600") likewise receives varied definitions, from Sacks's tightly focused and topical comparison of the Essex rebellion (1600) with Will Kemp's dancing journey to Norwich that same year, to Keene's emphasis on the city's economic longue durée from 1300-1700 and Schofield's account of sixteenth-century London's essentially medieval architectural fabric. The meaning of the term material, which varies with each contribution, is an explicit focus in Alan Sinfield's polemical reinforcement of Marxist claims for the materiality of culture and in his caveats against an empirical historicism that would reduce the meaning of material to "clothes, pots and pans, needles and pins, and to books and manuscripts as objects" (75-76). While a number of the essays in the volume do indeed address themselves to items in Sinfield's list, none are myopic in the ways that Sinfield suggests such scholarship can risk becoming.

The variety of topics, disciplines, and approaches that contributes to the volume's interest is bound to result in a certain centrifugality, but the editor's opening essay and her shrewd organization of the volume into five subsections, each with...