Walking in the City 4

Dear Colleagues:

This will be a linkless comment, in an interstice of the “lettered city” already opened for us by José and Stephen.

Having granted with Rama that the cleared ground on which the conquistadors laid out their perfectly ordered cities / theatres of conversion in the New World was only ever “supposedly… a ‘blank slate,’” should we also suppose that the cities of the Old World were indeed too “sedimented” with their pasts to permit “the flight of a designer’s fancy” (Lettered City 2) or else that they were already “palimpsests” (Arguedas) in the sense of being legible at more than one level by their inhabitants, whether lettered or unlettered?

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” (“Walking in the City”).

A case in point. When I was checking John Stow’s Survey of London (1598) to see how many converts I could find in the section on Old Jewry, what caught my eye was this sentence: “This Church [of St. Stephen] was sometime a Synagogue of the Iewes, then a Parish church, then a chappell to saint Olaues in the Iurie, vntill the seventh of Edward the fourth, and was then incorporated a parish church” (ed. Kingsford, 1: 284). Of course, there are many other such passages. As Andrew Gordon has seen, Stow’s idiom as a London letrado is neither cartographic nor ordinarily topographic: “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” (“Overseeing and Overlooking: John Stow and the Surveying of the City,” in John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Ian Gadd, here 79-80, my italics).

Stow, we might say, de-sediments the ancient-and-modern city in the service of a flight of his own fancy. For if Gordon is right, what was the surveyor attempting but a work of social engineering tantamount to mass conversion—i.e. the (re)conversion of a rapidly expanding and increasingly diverse, not to say rootless, urban population into an urban “community”? Stow’s method, moreover, was very much that of a certain kind of early modern European letrado or literatus, the kind that had lately decided—in a fit of “early modernism”—to call themselves antiquarians or antiquarii (a term that in the classical lexicon from which it was taken connoted researches in old MSS). Even if our fascination for finding palimpsests everywhere is postmodern and platt-Freudian, Stow (as Gordon, Gillespie et al. portray him) certainly lays himself open to the trope: “Throughout the Survey the narrative description of realisable spatial trajectories through the city coexists with the citation of documentary evidence… Stow’s textual archaeology… indicates the growing importance of textual authority over the resources of memory in the assertion of custom and precedent” (Gordon, loc. cit.).

These recent accidents of reading under the influence of our group-project have so far indicated two possible areas of inquiry for me, the first of which (I sense) has already attracted a lot of scholarship that I don’t know enough about yet, some of it no doubt by MaPs personnel:

1. The ambient historical-documentary and printed (re)theatricalization of London (Foxe, Harrison, Holinshed, Stow et al.) as a factor in conditioning audiences/publics for what we have begun to think of as a late Elizabethan and Jacobean “theatre of conversion” (Marlowe, Shakespeare & co.).

2. The longer history of Renaissance-to-Baroque texting and re-texting of city ecologies that somehow joins the social engineering projects of Petrarch (who toured Rome with the Mirabilia urbis Romae as his guidebook in one hand and Virgil’s Evander as his guide at the other) with those of Erasmus (“What is a city-state [civitas] but a huge monastery?”—Ep. 858 Allen) and then with those of the English humanist literati who followed in their wake, beginning (crucially, I think) with John Leland, self-styled royal antiquarius and surveyor of the first phase of the religious “reformation of the landscape” (Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland). Would it be worth trying to re-write part of the history of Renaissance “civic humanism” in the key of conversional cognitive ecology?

The backward horizon of these interests in my own work is traced by a chapter I wrote some years ago for the Blackwell Companion to Late Antiquity, on “Cities of the Mind: Renaissance Views of Early Christian Culture and the End of Antiquity.” One of my personal goals for Early Modern Conversions, as stated in our publicity, would be a study of “Erasmus and the Conversion of Latin Literature.” But I have never really wanted “literature” to be in my title, and the field that this group is now exploring—in which city, theatre and lettered persons form part of a complex conversion-ready ecosystem—begins to suggest a way round or out of that impasse.

So, that’s how my thoughts are running. I haven’t given links to readings here but would be happy to supply fuller references if anyone wants them.

With best wishes, Mark.