Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598-1720 (review)

"This city . . . is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect." ¹ Trapped in London's morning commuter traffic, the hero of Lively's novel muses on the built environment that surrounds him with an encapsulated history of centuries of urban experience. Similar observations inform the contributions in Merritt's collection focusing on London's shifting identity during a period of drastic change. Three themes dominate the research. Issues of continuity require the authors to study how changes in the city's physical size, culture, and social relationships were noticed and accepted, and the extent to which memory was selective. The nature of the metropolitan experience introduces the problem of reflection upon urban life, and the challenges that citizens faced in locating themselves mentally, as well as geographically, in the changing city. Finally, the moral impact of urban living demands consideration, in the ways in which cities brought opportunities for both sin and self-fulfillment.

All of these issues oblige the authors to incorporate methodologies of anthropology, literary criticism, and environmental geography in their historical analysis. Nostalgia for a bygone world guided John Stow's conceptualization of the city in Survey of London (1598), but it was not totally lacking in the enlarged and updated version compiled by John Strype 120 years later. Patrick Collinson's contribution examines Stow's characterization of a static urban experience from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and the deleterious impact of the Reformation on both material culture and urban character. Merritt continues the analysis of the construction of written works in his essay on the ways in which Stow's criticism was softened and blunted in later editions. Strype, in particular, preserved much of Stow's positive depiction of medieval London, while underlining its continuity with his own time, thus giving the post-fire city a strong heritage and historic identity. The selectivity of memory is also the subject of Ian Archer's study of post-Reformation monuments and rituals, as well as the connections that they forged with the past while reinforcing later sources of power and authority.

Contributions by Vanessa Harding, Robert Shoemaker, and Tim Hitchcock turn attention to the physical nature of living in an expanding metropolis. Unlike Stow, few individuals of the seventeenth century had personal knowledge of the whole extent of the city. They relied upon maps, street plans, and newspapers to guide their steps in, and their cognizance of, the changing urban center. Social class and gender influenced mobility within the city, and anonymity increased proportionately with the emergence of public spaces that muddled more traditional networks of responsibility and community care. The essays of Peter Lake and Laura Williams, in particular, develop this theme in their studies of the moral impact of urban life. Although traditional condemnations of cities as cesspools of sin, greed, and indulgence continued to be broadcast, elite culture tended to express confidence in urban culture and growth, connecting London's expansion to the realm's economic health. Such sanguine views may have resulted from increased access to the city's green spaces, which provided cleansing properties for the body and soul of both the individual and London itself.

The contributors are eager to explore "how Londoners experienced and understood their city" (2), expanding their reliance upon empirical sources "to consider the human, the particular, and the personal" (23). The result is a thoughtful and suggestive analysis of a unique metropolis and its citizens' views of its past, present, and future.