What we see of the city depends on our angle of vision. We are caught between wanting to see the whole or to understand what is transacted on the streets. We move between the perspective offered by a high vantage point and that given by burrowing down at ground level into the crowds of people. The former means defining the city's edges and forgoing the messy detail for what can be encompassed in a single view. The latter means losing the image of “the city” in an intense focus on the making of lives and the complications of relationships to others and to the small geographies of street corners, neighborhoods, and homes.Footnote 1 This is as much an issue for urban historians as it is for other urban dwellers or city visitors. They must choose an angle of vision.

The books under review here adopt different perspectives. The atlas of London in the 1690s uses taxation records for many thousands of individuals to reconstruct the aggregate patterns of wealth, work, and residence in a series of computer-drawn maps. The two edited collections contain essays that pull colorful strands out of the city's tapestry without either unraveling or describing the whole. In Material London the focus is on the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century city, and the contributors are an interdisciplinary mixture whose center of gravity lies in North American departments of English literature. In Londinopolis—the title borrowed from James Howell's book of 1657—attention is on a broader early modern period (c. 1500–1750), and the contributors are primarily drawn from English departments of history. This clearly makes for differences of theoretical framework, evidence, and mode of argument between the two collections. However, the similarities are also striking and seem to suggest a shift in the way the history of the city is being done.

While edited collections are always an opportunity to explore different takes on a common theme, the editors of Material London and Londinopolis are keen to point out that their theme itself is “difference.” Lena Cowen Orlin lists London's “multiple identities” (p. 3) and the academic disciplines and subdisciplines that must come together to do them justice. She also argues that this multiplicity was as true of the early modern period as it is now and that “if London was a matter for all England, every English man and woman had a different ‘London.’ The city's definition incorporated multiple individual fantasies for betterment, splendor, and diversion; it also incorporated multiple individual disappointments and failures” (p. 11). Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner in their introduction offer a fuller account of the city's historiography and present the essays that they have gathered together as an attempt to alter some long-standing “metanarratives of London history” (p. 3).Footnote 2 The first of these is a narrative of urban growth—that may be whiggish or its opposite depending on whether the focus is on something like trade or something like disease—which they associate with Beier and Finlay's London, 1500-1700 and an urban economic history that renders “London as a series of graphs and tables, or as a succession of maps” (p. 8) and in the process reifies the city, objectifies social relations, and neglects questions of culture and experience.Footnote 3 The second, and related, metanarrative is a functionalist one that understands urban history as a series of social and political responses to underlying and periodic economic crises, constructing a hierarchy of economic action and political, social, and sometimes cultural, reaction. As the editors emphasize, the “one methodological position [that] runs through the collection” is that none “invokes ‘the economic’ as something which is analytically separable from society or culture” (pp. 8–9). This, along with the coverage of the period from 1500 to 1750 in order to question any easy invocations of “modernity,” “the consumer revolution,” or the differences between pre- and post-Restoration London, means a shift of focus toward “histories about but not necessarily of London … [that] present a turbulent multiplicity of simultaneous and overlapping narratives” (p. 8). Both collections offer, therefore, multiple cultural histories of early modern London. While both are quite different from Craig Spence's atlas of the 1690s, it is also apparent that his mapping project was not conducted within a generally agreed historiographical agenda wherein the grounds for arguments about the early modern metropolis are shared. Instead, in its snapshot of London in the 1690s, it is also attentive primarily to demonstrating differences within the metropolis rather than change over time.

Yet to say that the shift in urban history is a cultural shift is not to say very much at all. What is interesting is what sort of cultural history this is. In particular, what is presented is a cultural history that attends to “the material” and to “space.” That urban history of any sort is concerned with the material and the spatial is, give or take the terminology, unremarkable since it has in various guises—usually bricks and mortar, and cartography or land-use arrangements—been doing that all along. That cultural history does so is for the more immediate theoretical concern to avoid the charge of “idealism” (Londinopolis, p. 9; Material London, p. 8) and to reengage with debates over social relations, and economic and political practices. This is cultural history that does not want to be relegated to the realms of representation and of the icing on the historical cake but seeks to explain how cities work and how people live their lives through them. Considering these approaches to, in turn, the material and the spatial can reveal how urban history and the city itself has been reconfigured in this shift.

Material London addresses this issue directly by offering its title as the answer to which contributors were invited to pose their own question. The diversity of response is instructive. In terms of subject matter, there are more or less reworked versions of architectural history (John Schofield's excellent survey of new building at around 1600, Andrew Gurr on the Globe and Fortune theaters, Linda Levy Peck on Jacobean aristocrats' urban palaces, Peter Blayney on John Day's unbuilt bookshop, and Lena Cowen Orlin on residential boundary disputes); attention to the material culture of food, clothing, and ornament (Joan Thirsk on London demand and provincial supply of new fruits, vegetables, striped stockings, and blankets; Jane Schneider on the changing meanings of colored cloth; Peter Stallybrass and Ann Jones on the multiple meanings and uses of Irish mantles and yellow starch; and Alice Friedman on London's luxury goods and the English country house); and interpretations of different responses to the market economy (David Harris Sacks on the earl of Essex's rebellion and Will Kemp's Morris dancing as misreadings of the social relations of the market, Alan Sinfield on Ben Jonson's Poetaster as a delineation of possible authorial positions, Jean Howard on city comedies and the anxieties of commerce, Ian Archer on Londoners' changing relationship to moneymaking, Gail Kern Paster on paying for medical purgation, and Patricia Fumerton on the vagrant subjectivity produced by a nascent market economy). Indeed, the collection reveals itself to have a clearer purpose than at first appears. The attention is primarily on whether the years when the sixteenth century became the seventeenth century, and England became Jacobean not Elizabethan, were a significant turning point in terms of the culture of consumption and with it London's place in the nation and England's place in the world.Footnote 4 Opinions certainly differ. Derek Keene's more demotic attention to fuel, beer, and building materials suggests not, while Linda Levy Peck's concentration on building, buying, and collecting at the court of King James I suggests a substantial transformation, albeit guided by the artists, artisans, and tastes of continental Europe that Keene also delineates. It would have been useful to have had this agenda set out more clearly in the book's introduction to reflect on why cultural interpretations of the material world have come to be so focused on questions of commodity consumption.

That there are other ways to approach “the material” is evident in Londinopolis. Here the essays “stress the significance of material culture in the construction of particular forms of urban living” (p. 9). The concerns of social history mean that this is as much about a world of necessities and of getting by as it is of pleasure and desire. This is evident in Faramerz Dabhoiwala's account of sexuality and economic exchange, Margaret Hunt's recovery of women's “right” to maintenance in the Court of Exchequer, Sara Pennell's reconstruction of the play of necessity and pleasure in London's eating places, and Mark Jenner's interpretation of the commodification of London water. It is even more evident in Craig Spence's atlas where data gathered from the assessments drawn up for the four shillings in the pound Aids of 1693 and 1694 and the Poll Taxes of 1692, 1694 and 1698 are used to investigate the built environment and the social and economic structures of the city. Here work, wealth, and the city's streets, houses, ropewalks, and vaults are tied together in a way that emphasizes production as much as consumption and exchange, and the eastern riverside parishes as much as the City and the West End.

It is also evident, though rarely commented on directly, that there are different theoretical approaches to what “the material” means. Alan Sinfield's sharp commentary on the progress of the term within literary studies—from the marxist critique of idealism's neglect of the conditions of literary production to contemporary concerns with “the thingness of the city” (Material London, p. 75)—has the virtue of pointing out that taking a position on the relationship between the material and the cultural is to take a political position on questions of production, literary and otherwise. The problem is that he is too ready to denigrate as apolitical “attention to clothes, pots and pans, needles and pins, and to books and manuscripts as objects” (pp. 75–76). In addition, his assertion that “culture is material because it is determined in the networks of power that licence and restrain ideological production” (p. 76) suggests an expansive definition of “the material” that prioritizes language and literature and does not help in differentiating between representations, cultural practices, and material objects.Footnote 5 It is also notable that his list of insignificant objects places books and manuscripts in a domestic and feminized realm of pins and pans that inadvertently signals attention to the material relationships among identity, power, and reproduction that have been central to the work of feminist scholars across a range of disciplines who have insisted on the importance of understanding “space.”Footnote 6

An overt attention to “space” is also a significant feature of the cultural turn in urban history. This is signaled overtly in Londinopolis, which contains a section on “senses of space and place,” including essays by Margaret Pelling on country-city relations as a response to disease, by Paul Griffiths on the politics of the crown's attempt to force the Goldsmiths back to Cheapside, and by Jeremy Boulton on the paupers of the rich West End parishes. In addition, there are also essays by Laura Gowing on women and social space, Michael Berlin on the meanings of local parochial ceremonies and rituals including boundary processions, and those by Pennell and Jenner (and by Howard, Fumerton, Friedman, Blayney, and Orlin in Material London) that interrogate a variety of spaces in order to pursue their various arguments. The specific, and broadly shared, nature of this attention to space can be outlined by differentiating it from the understanding of space deployed in the atlas of London in the 1690s. In that volume the quantitative data are mapped across the metropolitan area to understand the distributions of household density; land values; empty properties; rent values; women householders; aristocratic and gentry householders; household structures; the locations of sites of manufacture, storage, and retailing; and of the value of “stock” held as money, investments, raw materials, or stock-in-trade. In addition, the Poll Tax records for 1692 give occupational data for just under 13,000 inhabitants of the City of London, which are mapped to reveal occupational clusters. While there is careful attention to determining areal units that will permit the interpretation of the data, and also to understanding the patterns revealed in terms of both the physical and social topography of the city, it is only at the end of this process when composite maps can be drawn up, which, in their attention to different forms of wealth, “may well have corresponded with contemporary perceptions of the rich and poor areas of the metropolis” (p. 107), that the sort of space central to cultural history begins to come into view beyond the Cartesian coordinates that allow the mapping of a statistical version of material London.

This space is one that is a matter of meaning as much as materiality.Footnote 7 It is a malleable space that is subject to making and remaking and to the processes of contestation and negotiation that are the stuff of cultural politics. It is in relation to these spaces that people make their own identities and social relations and that they try to make identities and shape relationships for others. In these essays and elsewhere space takes many forms, we might call them “geographies,” discussed in terms of boundaries, territories, places, locations, networks, distributions, and relations of proximity and distance. This attention to these different geographies springs, I think, from the historiographical pressures that the cultural shift brings. Discussions of space permit a fragmentation of the city into geographies that can each have their own different narratives but, more importantly, can also be the sites of conflict and contestation that simultaneously bring together both a variety of human agents intent on making meanings and the institutional or structural forces that stabilize them, at least temporarily, or reproduce them over a longer time scale. If the essays pay more attention to the former, then the atlas pays more attention to the latter. Yet there are benefits in bringing them together.

One striking map drawn from the 1693–94 Aid database shows the locations of one hundred and forty-five households headed by aristocracy (fig. 4.8, p. 82). There were none within the walls of the City of London, and all but one (and that is marked with a query) lay to the west of St. Paul's Cathedral. The distribution of gentry-headed households (fig. 4.9, p. 84) was less stark but showed the same basic pattern. As Spence explains, “An earlier pattern of aristocratic residence in London, in which a significant minority of those with a rank higher than that of knight were to be found in the City or in its northern and eastern suburbs, had been swept away as a result of the increasing concentration of court and fashionable life in the west and by a proliferation of industry and poor housing to the east” (p. 88). This changing relationship between the West End and the City can be animated and complicated by considering the cultural and political relationships between areas and social groups. As Ian Archer points out in his essays (and he is the only author represented in both collections), the early seventeenth century was marked by “a profound ambivalence in the city's attitude towards the court and the values of gentlemen” (Londinopolis, p. 32). On the one hand, the City's fortunes depended on the favor of the crown, and City politics were marked by a conjunction of aristocratic populism and civic chivalry. On the other hand, “there were many areas where value systems clashed” (Londinopolis, p. 32), and while corporate bodies were fighting over their royal charters, City apprentices were often battling in the streets with gentlemen's serving men. At the same time, and in the eyes of others, the image of those who ruled the City was uncertain. As Archer puts it, “there was … something schizophrenic about the attitudes of contemporaries to the wealth of the London business elite” (Material London, p. 181).

The new culture of commerce was attended with anxieties over status, morality, and the erosion of social boundaries. Many of these concerns crystallized around the issue of the freedoms and status of women, and their place in the city. Alice Friedman argues on the basis of Elizabeth, Lady Willougby's conflicts with her husband Sir Francis in the 1570s over her refusal to return from London to Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire, that “the city was no place for a gentlewoman alone, her business was in the country with her husband and children” (Material London, p. 240). Yet there were women of other classes whose life could not but be the city life that Elizabeth had struggled for. As Laura Gowing's chapter in Londinopolis demonstrates, city spaces and gendered identities were made at the same time. Their crucial roles in the city's changing economy, especially in retailing and services, saw women living, working, and walking in London's public spaces. Foreign visitors “commented on their drinking in taverns and engaging in unsupervised sports with members of the opposite sex” (Archer in Material London, p. 185), and these women (or their descendants) also had a strong sense of their “rights” within marriage and a willingness to go to law to enforce them (Hunt in Londinopolis, pp. 118–21). At the same time, however, a regulative discourse of disorder, evident in legal fact and dramatic fiction, problematized their presence in certain places at certain times (see Dabhoiwala in Londinopolis and Howard in Material London). One key association was of women and the pleasures and dangers of luxurious consumption. Once again the ambivalence was evident. Tradesmen used the sexual allure of their wives to attract purchasers, yet the theme of lascivious aristocrats preying on the spouses of innocent (or ignorant) citizens was a constant one in city comedies and, it seems, at City feasts where women were “put to the squeak” (quoted in Archer, Londinopolis, p. 32). Definitions of class and status, and of city and court, were gendered through and through. The identities of mercantile London and of aristocratic London were built on trying to make particular and different forms of masculinity and femininity within civic and courtly spaces, streets, homes, and parks and gardens. To return to the atlas, another striking map shows the distribution of households headed by women in the mid-1690s (fig. 4.5, p. 76). It reveals that the central, and richest, areas of the City of London were among the areas where fewest such households could be found. There was, it seems, less room here for independent women than in the suburbs, although they were also underrepresented in the richest commercial areas of the West End. Explaining and understanding the significance of these patterns requires both the hard materiality of “relative poverty” and an attention to the shaping of urban space in the long term (London in the 1690s, p. 77) and a cultural materialism attentive to the experience, signification, and negotiation of urban space by those who lived the city and walked its streets.