Material London, ca. 1600
Edited by Lena Cowen Orlin
Between 1500 and 1700, London grew from a minor national capital to the largest city in Europe. The defining period of growth was the period from 1550 to 1650, the midpoint of which coincided with the end of Elizabeth I's reign and the height of Shakespeare's theatrical career.
In Material London, ca. 1600, Lena Cowen Orlin and a distinguished group of social, intellectual, urban, architectural, and agrarian historians, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and literary critics explore the ideas, structures, and practices that distinguished London before the Great Fire, basing their investigations on the material traces in artifacts, playtexts, documents, graphic arts, and archaeological remains.
In order to evoke "material London, ca. 1600," each scholar examines a different aspect of one of the great world cities at a critical moment in Western history. Several chapters give broad panoramic and authoritative views: what architectural forms characterized the built city around 1600; how the public theatre established its claim on the city; how London's citizens incorporated the new commercialism of their culture into their moral views. Other essays offer sharply focused studies: how Irish mantles were adopted as elite fashions in the hybrid culture of the court; how the city authorities clashed with the church hierarchy over the building of a small bookshop; how London figured in Ben Jonson's exploration of the role of the poet.
Although all the authors situate the material world of early modern London--its objects, products, literatures, built environment, and economic practices--in its broader political and cultural contexts, provocative debates and exchanges remain both within and between the essays as to what constitutes "material London, ca. 1600."
Lena Cowen Orlin is Research Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is the author of Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England and Elizabethan Households: An Anthology.
New Cultural Studies
2000 | 400 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 52 illus.
ISBN 978-0-8122-1721-6 | Paper | $34.95s | £23.00
World Rights | History, Cultural Studies
Short copy:
Material London, ca. 1600 reconstructs one of the great world cities at a critical moment in Western history.

1. Introduction
—Lena Cowen Orlin

PART I. MEANINGS OF MATERIAL LONDON
2. London's Dominion: The Metropolis, the Market Economy, and the State
—David Harris Sacks
3. Material London in Time and Space
—Derek Keene
4. Poetaster, the Author, and the Perils of Cultural Production
—Alan Sinfield

PART II. CONSUMER CULTURE: DOMESTICATING FOREIGN FASHION
5. England's Provinces: Did They Serve or Drive Material London?
—Joan Thirsk
6. Fantastical Colors in Foggy London: The New Fashion Potential of the Late Sixteenth Century
—Jane Schneider
7. "Rugges of London and the Diuell's Band": Irish Mantles and Yellow Starch as Hybrid London Fashion
—Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass
8. Women, Foreigners, and the Regulation of Urban Space in Westward Ho
—Jean E. Howard

PART III. SUBJECTS OF THE CITY
9. Material Londoners?
—Ian W. Archer
10. Purgation as the Allure of Mastery: Early Modern Medicine and the Technology of the Self
—Gail Kern Paster
11. London's Vagrant Economy: Making Space for "Low" Subjectivity
—Patricia Fumerton

PART IV. DIVERSIONS AND DISPLAY
12. Inside/Out: Women, Domesticity, and the Pleasures of the City
Alice T. Friedman
13. The Authority of the Globe and the Fortune
—Andrew Gurr
14. Building, Buying, and Collecting in London, 1600-1625
—Linda Levy Peck

PART V. BUILDING THE CITY
15. The Topography and Buildings of London, ca. 1600
John Schofield
16. John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was
—Peter W. M. Blayney
17. Boundary Disputes in Early Modern London
—Lena Cowen Orlin

Lena Cowen Orlin is Research Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is the author of Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England and Elizabethan Households: An Anthology.