EMC reading group essays, etc.

Dear Group Members,

As some of you may already know, IPLAI will hold an Early Modern Conversions reading group at McGill in the coming year. The sessions will be recorded and put up on the site, so those of you based outside of Montreal will be able to listen in.

José and I will present on behalf of the Cities research sub-group on March 10. The articles we have asked the group to read for our session are posted below. I thought that some of you might appreciate an advance look.

 -De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993: 156-163.

 Many EMC members will likely be familiar with this cultural studies classic. Mark suggested that it may be of some interest to our project in his blog post of Oct. 23: “It seems to me that as we cross back to Europe’s old worlds, we have a chance to rethink historically the processes by which—in Certeau’s famous phrase from the top of the World Trade Tower—a city such as London could in fact learn ‘the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.’”

 In addition, I think it is worth considering what light the the essay may bring to bear on what our project description refers to as “geo-spatial conversions.” As Certeau himself points out, the ‘panoptic’ (or ‘cartographic’) perspective—which he contrasts with ‘walking’ (or spatializing action)—has its origin in early modernity. To what extent might this new way of thinking about cities relate to new ways of thinking about, and re-constituting, individual identities?

 -Nuti, Lucia. “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational Language.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 76, No. 1 (1994): 105-128.

 Nuti considers Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (1572), a collection of perspective drawings of European cities. The article offers a counter-argument of-sorts to Certeau by demonstrating how the cartographic view in fact worked in concert with other ways of spatializing the city (the same is true, I think, for Gordon’s essay on John Stow—see below).

We will also ask reading group members to take a quick look at some images from Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (1572): http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/mapmakers/braun_hogenberg.html

While I’m at it, I thought I might also post a few further essays that may be of particular interest to those of us working on London:

-Gordon, Andrew. “Overlooking and Overseeing: John Stow and the Surveying of the City.” John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book. Eds. Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie. London: British Library, 2004: 81-89.

Mark quoted p 79-80 in his blog post of Oct. 23: ““It is rather the attempt to find a textual analogue for a particular way of conceptualizing space [viz. that of estate and Rogationtide perambulations] that both derives from, and seeks to encourage, communal identification with the urban environment. Like the map, it stands in place of the phenomenological experience of space itself. But, unlike the map, it preserves the social investment in that space, presenting to the reader a multi-layered urban environment in which the city emerges as the product of its populace, both past and present.”

-Stock, Angela. “Stow’s Survey and the London Playwrights.” John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book. Eds. Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie. London: British Library, 2004: 89-98.

This essay is in the same collection as Gordon. Especially worth a look for those of us working on London’s early modern playhouses.

Happy reading!