“Saucy Stink”: Smells, Sanitation, and Conflict in Early Modern London

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-86
Author(s):  
Alexandra Logue
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Waste Management ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Demographic Changes ◽  
Urban Rivers ◽  
Kitchen Waste ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The City ◽  
Seasonal Weather

This article examines olfactory offenses in early modern London. It explores how inhabitants managed causes of malodorous air, focusing on common nuisances stemming from everyday household practices like laundry and waste management. Clotheslines were hung up between lodgings, households disposed of kitchen waste in gutters overflowing with garbage, and neighbours used stinking, communal privies. Seasonal weather intensified the city’s poor air quality, and rainwater washed refuse into urban rivers. In the early seventeenth century, the growing awareness of the effects of air quality on health coincided with significant demographic changes in the city. Insalubrious air was intrinsically linked to increased migration, overcrowded neighbourhoods, and the spread of diseases. The improvement of the city’s air quality became a more immediate concern for Londoners, civic authorities, and the early Stuart monarchs, who deployed a range of sanitation strategies. As London grew, so too did concern for its inhabitants and the dwellings they occupied.

“O'erwhelmed with noise”: Abject Female Speech in Epicene; or, The Silent Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213
Author(s):  
Laura Swift
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Conduct Literature ◽  
Ideal Woman ◽  
Female Speech ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The City ◽  
The Ideal

This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.

Consider the Oyster Seller: Street Hawkers and Gendered Stereotypes in Early Modern London

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Taverner
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
Gendered Stereotypes ◽  
The City

Abstract Oyster sellers were ubiquitous on London’s streets and as characters in high and low culture. This article contrasts the varied, sophisticated working life of mostly female hawkers with their sexualized representation in the multimedia genre of Cries. It connects these divergent stories to bigger narratives of socio-economic change in London, gender relations, and changing ways of imagining the emergent metropolis. While previous work focused on hawkers’ marginality and read the Cries uncritically, this article shows how humble food sellers kept the city fed, became symbolic of cultural change, and may have been affected by their representations.

Social networks and language change in Tudor and Stuart London – only connect?

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERTTU NEVALAINEN
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Linguistic Terms ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Exchange Network ◽  
The City

Place is an integral part of social network analysis, which reconstructs network structures and documents the network members’ linguistic practices in a community. Historical network analysis presents particular challenges in both respects. This article first discusses the kinds of data, official documents, personal letters and diaries that historians have used in reconstructing social networks and communities. These analyses could be enriched by including linguistic data and, vice versa, historical sociolinguistic findings may often be interpreted in terms of social networks.Focusing on Early Modern London, I present two case studies, the first one investigating a sixteenth-century merchant family exchange network and the second discussing the seventeenth-century naval administrator Samuel Pepys, whose role as a community broker between the City and Westminster is assessed in linguistic terms. My results show how identifying the leaders and laggers of linguistic change can add to our understanding of the varied ways in which linguistic innovations spread to and from Tudor and Stuart London both within and across social networks.

Architecture, Anatomy, and the New Science in Early Modern London

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Modern London

Focuses on an important but overlooked building in late seventeenth-century London: the College of Physicians on Warwick Lane designed by the scientist and architect Robert Hooke in the 1670s. The building, which was commissioned in response to the previous college’s destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666, was itself demolished in the nineteenth century. In this article, Matthew Walker argues that the conception and design of Hooke’s college had close links with the early Royal Society and its broader experimental philosophical program. This came about through the agency of Hooke—the society’s curator—as well as the prominence of the college’s physicians in the experimental philosophical group in its early years. By analyzing Hooke’s design for the college, and its prominent anatomy theater in particular, this article thus raises broader questions about architecture’s relationship with medicine and experimental science in early modern London.

scholarly journals The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-141
Author(s):  
Ian Munro (book author) ◽  
Mathew Martin (review author)
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The City

scholarly journals ‘I trac’d him too and fro’: Walking the Neighbourhood on the Early Modern Stage

Early Theatre ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tomlin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

<p>This article considers the ways in which plays stage the negotiation of the relationship between public and private space in early modern London through characters walking in the city. It uses concepts developed by Michel de Certeau and Pierre Mayol to think about the twentieth-century city to argue that Heywood’s <em>Edward IV</em> and the anonymous <em>A Warning for Fair Women</em> present walking the streets of London as an act of recognition and knowing that distinguishes those who belong in the city from those who do not.</p>

The Road to Jerusalem

2020 ◽  
pp. 161-178
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Characteristic Type ◽  
The Road ◽  
Biblical Scholar ◽  
The City

Chapter 5 describes the English chaplains’ experiences of the journey to Jerusalem in the seventeenth century. It argues, contrary to a long-held view, that the Jerusalem pilgrimage did not become entirely irrelevant for Protestants. William Biddulph, sometimes seen as an ‘anti-pilgrim’, can be understood rather as a characteristic type of early modern traveller. When the traditional role of the pilgrim was combined with that of the ‘eyewitness’ the holy sites could be compared with Scripture to produce testimonies of service to the biblical scholar. The chapter then argues that ‘devotion and curiosity’ continued to motivate the Jerusalem pilgrimages of both a series of chaplains and many English merchants. The final part of the chapter analyses the report of one such pilgrim, the chaplain William Hallifax, who made the journey to Jerusalem in 1691, leaving in manuscript an account of his time in the city and the antiquities he discovered en route.

scholarly journals The rediscovery of Palmyra and its dissemination in Philosophical Transactions

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Gregorio Astengo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

This paper examines the first publicly documented western encounter with the ancient city of Palmyra as an archaeological site. This encounter was achieved in the late seventeenth century by a group of British merchants, who reached Palmyra and made drawings and reports of its ruins. The reports were then published in Philosophical Transactions in the mid 1690s. This paper points to the ways in which such accounts came into being, as well as how the city was described and publicly communicated for the first time in Philosophical Transactions . These articles had a great impact throughout the following centuries as a reference for the study of Palmyra. This paper therefore also stresses the pivotal role of Philosophical Transactions for the production and dissemination of Palmyra's archaeological legacy, as well as for the development of early modern archaeology within the early Royal Society.

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