Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

3. The Writing on the Wall: London’s Old Jewry and John Stow’s Urban Palimpsest

three The Writing on the Wall London’s Old Jewry and John Stow’s Urban Palimpsest The trivial, circumscribed, decaying, and obsolete acquire their own dignity and inviolability through the fact that the preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian man has emigrated into them and there made its home. The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays, like an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds again himself, his force, his industry, his joy, his judgment, his folly and vices. . . . Sometimes he even greets the soul of his nation across the long dark centuries of confusion as his own soul; an ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be—these are his talents and virtues. —Nietzsche, ‘‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’’ With his thumbnail sketch of the antiquarian, Nietzsche shows how readily civic history can be made to repose in the mundane material relics of urban space. The antiquarian, argues Nietzsche, finds historical riches in ‘‘trivial, circumscribed, decaying, and obsolete’’ things, such as ‘‘city . . . walls’’ and ‘‘the towered gate.’’ The heightened attention the antiquarian accords such things anticipates the recent critical fascination with Renais- 96 explosions sance material culture, which has itself been dubbed a ‘‘new antiquarianism .’’1 Yet Nietzsche’s sketch admits another element largely missing from work in the field. Despite the scorn he directs at the desire to conserve every trivial thing, he praises the antiquarian’s ‘‘ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be.’’ Here Nietzsche hints at what scholarship on material culture often elides: that the object is not a temporally singular entity but rather polychronic, multiply inscribed through and by time. Tellingly, the metaphor Nietzsche employs for this multiple inscription is the palimpsest, which recognizes the temporal excess and thus the untimely potential of the antiquarian’s seemingly trivial things. Nietzsche’s caricature of the antiquarian historian was not composed with John Stow in mind. But it uncannily captures the spirit of the sixteenthcentury London antiquary’s most famous project—his Survey of London (1598, revised 1603).2 In this extraordinary work of urban chorography, the nostalgically minded Stow anticipates Nietzsche by treating his beloved London , which had changed so dramatically since his pre-Reformation childhood , ‘‘like an illuminated diary of his youth.’’ In the process, Stow does more than simply map London’s geography and plot its history. Instead, his Survey discovers the city’s past in its physical features. That past is not, for Stow, a synchronic totality quarantined from his present; nor is it even a linear sequence of moments that diachronically evolves into the now. Rather, it anachronistically resides in the living city as legible matter, as (in Nietzsche ’s words) ‘‘traces almost extinguished.’’ For Stow as for Nietzsche’s antiquarian , the city is a polychronic palimpsest: everywhere he looks, he sees the manifold traces of the past writ, and rewrit, large. And he does so by focusing on precisely those trivial things that Nietzsche regards as the antiquarian’s chief fetishes, the city walls and the towered gate. Stow reads, quite literally, the writing on the wall—more specifically, the wall of one of its crumbling towered gates, Ludgate—and he finds in that writing the untimely traces of London’s medieval Jewry. As I shall demonstrate, Stow attends to these traces partly to document a superseded past: Jewish matter provides him with a typologically coded ‘‘then’’ supplanted by the Christian ‘‘now.’’ Yet the polychronic elements of Stow’s London do not always resolve themselves into a temporality of supersession. Nietzsche notes that the antiquarian ‘‘finds . . . himself’’ in the mundane details of the past, and this applies very much to Stow. His The Writing on the Wall 97 identification with London’s antique matter results at times in a different intuition of temporality, one in which the past is less canceled by the present than set to work in and against it. In this, he can be seen as a practical theorist of the temporality of explosion. Like Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist...