In these essays London is always “plural” (8), “volatile” (2), “overlapping” (1), “multiple” (245), a “polyglot and hybrid space” (4), a “tinderbox” (243), and a “palimpsest” (252). It is a city with “proximate overlapping places and spaces” (1), “multiple identities” (252), “multiple temporal and geographic meanings” (245), “multiple personages” (32), and “multiple practical and symbolic functions” (11). These essays are “novel” as they are “bound up” in a “volatile combination” of what it was to be “human, spatial,” and “temporal” (2), and “new” as “the plural nature of the city” is a given (8). Also “interdisciplinarity” is a byword “within them” (4). Large claims these, and one thing to say from the start is that this volume is not as “novel” or “new” as is claimed: multiple, plural, overlapping, and spatial have been titles and themes in past London's mosaic for a while now. I’m sure that the historians and literature folk got on like a house on fire at the Huntington conference that was the starting point of this volume. But reading these essays, it's not hard to spot who is a historian and who is a literary critic, with the single exception of Lena Orlin, appropriate for someone with a track record of absorbing work on porous boundaries.

The “volume is unified” through “cultural processes” that turn “places into social spaces” whose identities hinge on the people living or working in them or just passing through on their way somewhere else (4), who make and remake space day after day, by the hour, Lawrence Manley says about “playing spaces” that he persuasively locates in inns or the season or civic/church calendar (189). People “produce” space and so do plays (139); space stretching far and wide across cities, counties, countries, and oceans. London was “linked to a myriad of other places,” we hear, somewhat unsurprisingly (3). Goldsmiths made good livings taking advantage of faraway slaves scraping gold out of mines. Coleman Street radicals were in touch with fellow travelers in the Low Countries and newly settled American lands. This same street is an example, Adrian Johns thinks, of something existing in brick, stone, and wood, and also in minds with causes as an “ideological location” or “virtual area” (35), like John Goodwin's “placeless church” (41), in a street that had been shaken by radical tremors since Lollards and whose name made people think of unorthodoxy. Likewise, Vanessa Harding argues, again unsurprisingly, that anything official staged in lustrous Cheapside was in the “public realm” and elevated by “psychological centrality” (77, 94); Joseph Ward makes the case that the Thames was a symbolic “mirror” by which Londoners gauged the state of the city and (without much to back this up) the nation (70); and Janette Dillon notes that the Clerkenwell/Smithfield areas had long been linked to “performative traditions,” a good reason, therefore, to build the Red Bull and Fortune playhouses there (127).

The real hub of this volume is how Londoners responded in their daily lives and cultures to sweeping changes that altered their city for good in little more than a century (starting around 1540). How did they think through dizzy growth, the headlong rush of global trade, boom and bust, and environments that became more impersonal with each new day? And how did they understand changing worlds in order to keep on top of them? They did so in terms of time, Jonathan Gil Harris writes in an essay worth reading two or three times to appreciate its smart subtleties. In it he shows with source know-how how in Ludgate's shining symbolism people reached back to London's affirming founding myths caught in stone in Lud's figure on the gate to mix in one soup past, present, and future. This soup softened anxieties about global markets represented in Adam Eyre, the central character in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1600), who takes a chance and snaps up a shipload of spices, sugar, and nuts at a knockdown price but luckily ends up with bumper profits. The point being that it all so easily could have gone the other way for Eyre in commercial worlds now more than ever at the volatile mercy of uncertain risk, chance, debt, and credit.

Also angling at similar issues is a gem of an essay by Crystal Bartolovich whose text is William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598), the first comedy that we know of to set scenes in familiar London places and spaces: St. Paul’s, the Exchange, and the same streets that the audience walked up and down from one day to the next. In a nutshell, she argues that dramatizing these familiar haunts and their routine hustle and bustle and chitchat helped people to come to terms with abstract, alien, external, impersonal, and more intrusive market forces, represented here in the figure of a Portuguese merchant (143). London was contained, known, and “there” for the people in the galleries and stalls; the merchant's world was risky and “elsewhere” (150). Don’t worry, Haughton seems to say, we in our unified city can tame markets. His drama, like other works under the microscope here, warns about the unpredictable hazards of markets and credit networks. So much so, that Gil Harris points outs that “a pervasive obsession with the language of debt” is a running theme of The Shoemaker's Holiday (29), a play written, of course, by someone who was very familiar with the insides of debtor prisons.

As might be expected, a couple of historians who have tried to show how London was more or less a stable society beat that same drum here. Working with poems rather than his more usual archives, Ward's aim is to show how Londoners read the Thames, although only the frozen river. Ice, he argues, brought opportunities for “social and personal transformation,” linking the two riverbanks (61). In a by now predictable argument, “social distress” was eased by charity, a figure in John Taylor's “The Colde Terme” (1621), whose symbolic presence, Ward writes, was meant to chide well-off citizens to dig deep into their pockets to help the needy, although it would be worth finding out if there is any archival evidence that charity increased in times of frost. Ian Archer finds another reason to believe that the Crown and City got along well together, this time in the money pouring into the city for cloth needed for ceremonies when a monarch was crowned or buried. These rich pickings were widely spread and tightened “reciprocal ties” between City and Court (159) and got for Whitehall “a body of loyalists” among London's higher-end dealers and craftsmen (177). There were more royal funerals and coronations than frost fairs on the freezing Thames, but I wonder if there were enough of them to clinch Archer's case. It might be that we will need a larger analysis and count of royal expenditure in the square mile to make it stick. Martha Carlin's essay on “the evolution of public dining” does not fit neatly with places and spaces but is instead a narrative of options for eating out from around 1450 on, interesting for that, but also sounding quite familiar as it is mostly about the late medieval period already made known to us through Carlin's own work. It does not help that the decades after 1550 in which the main subjects of the essay—the “ordinary” eating places with set meals at fixed prices—open their doors for the first time get barely two pages of coverage. Last but not least is Orlin's essay on lodging cultures and the floating people who needed them to keep their heads above water, which is almost a dyed-in-the-wool work of history from a literary scholar who knows how to use archives. Transience was one thing that shaped the growing city, she argues convincingly. Lodging houses were thorns in the sides of City leaders but also opportunities for people (women mainly) to make money on the side renting rooms to hard-up migrants and sick or pregnant Londoners who needed help quickly. “The new impermanence transformed the lives [and] deaths” of Londoners, Orlin writes with rich evidence on her side (242). The result is another smart piece of work that brick by brick builds more subtle and sophisticated senses of early modern cultural and social London, getting down to street level to get inside the lives of the many migrants without whom this sprawling city would have shrunk rather than become Europe's largest metropolis.

So, early modern London ought now to be plural, permeable, multiple, hybrid, humming, and interdisciplinary. It ought to be a collage that cannot be pinned down by administrative or geographical borders or spaces imagined in terms of one thing alone or without symbolic freight. And like any large city that was getting larger all the time, it is never still or stable, requiring a continuous cycle of reimagining what it was or one day might become: a city whose people (the best of these essays show) tried to comprehend, control, and domesticate a bulging city, migrant streams, and cold market forces that couldn’t care less about lives through images of a comforting continuous past and contained present and future available to them in spaces, places, policies, proclamations, prose, plays, and poems. But that is not to say that they did feel on top of things.