"The World Runs on Wheeles": John Stow's Indescribable London

John Stow's Survey of London (1598, 1603) has been read one of two ways. Prevailing opinion holds that Stow (1524/5-1605) surveyed the early modern city for its medieval past. Lawrence Manley has argued, contrarily, that Stow confronted differences in the cityscape. In this essay, I contend that while Stow confronted early modern London in the Survey, he did so through medieval means of urban description, which presuppose an ahistorical, supra-personal city. By addressing spatio-temporal change through intractable means, Stow purposefully generated an elaborate failure of description. His Survey means to reproduce the impossibility of perceiving rightly early modern London.