London Locations: Urban Geography, Creative Opportunities and Literary Representations

London Renaissance Seminar / Paris Early Modern Seminar One-day Conference

14 June 2024

Room 106

43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

Birkbeck, University of London

Source: Civitates orbis terrarum. Public Domain Mark 1.0 https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/view-of-london-in-civitates-orbis-terrarum

 

What did London locations mean to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people, and what do they mean to contemporary scholars?

Exploring both aspects of London’s places, this one-day conference considers the many meanings of London’s places for literary and cultural research. As a hugely expanding metropolis and the centre of printing, law, playing and the court as well as offering key opportunities to clerics and religious dissidents, London locations can be significant in many ways. Please tell us about well-known and notorious places – St Paul’s, the playhouses, the court – or about corners and streets we have forgotten, misunderstood and overlooked. You might want to find out more about where your author landed, how she lived in Cheapside, Stepney or Edmonton; how a printer worked; where ballads were sold, how a comedy uses London’s streets. You might want to tell us about the City of London or its suburbs and close villages, and speak about London’s evolving geography and architecture before and after the Great Fire. How did artists and writers inhabit its streets and how was their work inspired by it? Which London Locations facilitated the creation of networks for artists? We are keen to hear about primary material and located research as we think about whether London is a cosmopolis, global centre, birthplace of empire.

At the same time, we want to know how we should approach these London locations and we welcome papers considering how we should theorise London’s places and what London’s locations suggest about its place in the world.

Papers will be between 15 and 20 minutes (length tbc) and we welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages. We are keen to have abstracts from historians, art historians and literary scholars. Please send an abstract of 150-200 words stating the location or locations you explore, the main terrain of your argument and what you want to discuss and a short biographical note, to s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk, e.lauenstein@bbk.ac.uk and aurelie.griffin@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by Friday 5 April 2024.

 

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