Cities in the Antiquarian Discourse of the 16th–17th Centuries

Abstract

The article deals with the models and strategies of description and constructing the city space in tracts and chorographies written by the English antiquaries during the Tudor and the Early Stuart age. Antiquarian narratives (besides The Survey of London by J. Stow) generally were not concentrated on the description of cities. Nevertheless, antiquarian tracts, especially chorographies, played an important part in the process of construction of the English proto-national identity. The space corresponding to this identity was also the object of the intellectual construction. Until recently the works of the English antiquaries were not considered as important historical sources in the field of historical urbanistic studies. Actually, antiquarian tracts, especially the chorographies can expose new aspects of the process of conceptualizing cities by the Tudor intellectuals. The article analyzes the works of Leland, Selden, Stow, Holland, Cowell Vowell, and other antiquaries. An Aristotelian paradigm of the city as a polity remained the dominant and defining for the Tudor intellectuals. The dichotomy of matter and form in the description of a polity was expressed as distinguishing between res and homines, that is between the material arrangement of a polity and the community constituting a polity. From the chorographies depicting the territory of the kingdom as a whole, emerged two functional definitions of the city: the city as a point of reference on the map, that allowed to measure of geographical space: and as a spatial object, containing several places of historical memory. Descripting the inner urban space, the antiquaries actualized both classical patterns (descriptions of Rome) and Early Modern epistemological schemes (Ramism) and, finally, ethnogenetic myths (the conquest of Britain by Brutus).

Keywords

• city
• urban space
• antiquaries
• antiquarian discourse
• chorography
• the tudors
• the stuarts
• england