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Contesting Inheritance: William Smith and Isabella Whitney

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Writing Early Modern London

Part of the book series: Early Modern Literature in History ((EMLH))

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Abstract

The legacy of Reformation encompassed innovation as well as destruction, accommodation and transformation. The urban memoranda of Henry Machyn speak to a conceptual cityscape centred upon loss but the cultural upheavals of the period also provided the impetus to seek new ways of understanding and representing London. The project of representing London in textual form encouraged authors to examine the multiple operations that might make up a city. They shared the epistemological challenges of knowing London with those developing new methods of information gathering who confronted the difficulties of translating information into knowledge formats useful for civic administration. To write the city was to configure it; to construct on the page the relations between a cast of constituent elements and to anatomise the mechanics of their interrelationship, identifying the driving forces of urban life. To do so was also to call into question the praxis of urban community, examining in what forms community was realised within the structures of city life and so bringing under scrutiny the very meaning of urban society.

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Notes

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, UK

    Andrew Gordon

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© 2013 Andrew Gordon

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Gordon, A. (2013). Contesting Inheritance: William Smith and Isabella Whitney. In: Writing Early Modern London. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137294920_3

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