Writing Early Modern London ― Memory, Text and Community

What does it mean to write the city? How could the myriad experiences of life in early modern London be translated into textual form? In a detailed study of works ranging from little known manuscript accounts to major canonical texts from the pen of Thomas Middleton and Isabella Whitney, Writing Early Modern London pursues these questions. Arguing that the impulse to record and reflect upon the early modern city was fuelled by the process of religious reformation, it traces the profound impact of these upheavals upon how community was experienced and imagined. The authors studied here show how rites of community were appropriated and re-imagined in texts which responded creatively to the transformation of urban life. Contesting London's future involved contesting the past, and Writing Early Modern London demonstrates how memory became a key cultural battleground, one in which writing itself was implicated, as a far-reaching 'reformation of the archive' challenged the habits of memory within early modern culture.

Andrew Gordon is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on early modern London, manuscript culture and correspondence. He has edited (with Bernhard Klein) Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001), and (with Thomas Rist) The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern Britain (2013).