Description
Book SynopsisOld St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors demonstrate how the site, as well as the people and trades occupying the precinct, can be positioned within wider fields of representations, practices, and social networks. A focus on St Paul’s is therefore about more than just the specific site on Ludgate Hill: it is about those practices and representations connected to it, which either extended beyond or originated in places other than the Cathedral environs. This points to the range of localised, regional, national, and transnational relationships in which the precinct and its people were situated and to which they contributed.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The importance of St Paul’s Cathedral in Medieval London - Simon Yarrow.- Chapter 2: Sacred Space, Memory, and Materiality in St Erkenwald: ‘As þai makkyd & mynyd a meruayle þai founden’ - Laura Varnam.- Chapter 3: The Legendary History of St Paul’s - Rory McTurk.- Chapter 4: The Beastly Body in St Paul’s Cathedral - Jennifer Reid.- Chapter 5: London’s ‘Long Reformation’, the Corporation and Old St Paul’s - Mary Morrissey.- Chapter 6: Donne’s State Church and the Paul’s Cross Sermons - Victor Houliston.- Chapter 7: The Commercial Cultures of Playing in Elizabethan London - Callan Davies.- Chapter 8: The ‘playhouse’ at St Paul’s: What we know of the theatre in the Almonry - José A. Pérez Díez.- Chapter 9: Paul’s Boys, John Marston and Plausible Plants: Acting Natural - Will Tosh.- Chapter 10: Buying and Selling Books around St Paul's Cathedral: 'Be Dishonest, and tell Lies' - Daniel Starza Smith & Benjamin King-Cox.- Chapter 11: Publishing King Lear (1608) at the Sign of the Pied Bull - Amy Lidster.- Chapter 12: St Paul’s and London News Culture, 1618-25 - Kirsty Rolfe.- Chapter 13: Publishing King Lear (1608) at the Sign of the Pied Bull - Amy Lidster.- Chapter 14: The Career Paths of the Clergy at Old St Paul’s: Patronage and Profit - Simon Healy.- Chapter 15: John Donne’s Two Servants - Mary Ann Lund.
