Civic and Symbolic Space in Representation and Ritual in the Renaissance
Abstract
This project examines the conception and imaging of the city in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The thesis aims to chart the ways in
which a spatialised reading of the metropolis most fully realised in ceremonial
representations of the city informs representational strategies of the time.
Chapter 1 looks at the transformations taking place during this period in
the practice of land surveying, exploring the implications of the new techniques of
geometrical survey for conceptions of civic space. Examining the parallels
between the viewing of the estate and the reformation of the Rogationtide
ceremonies of perambulating the bounds, the urban context for spatial description
is analysed through a reading of John Stow's Survey of London.
In Chapter 2 the resistance of the city to a strictly geometrical conception
of space is traced through an analysis of early printed maps of the city and the
texts of civic ceremonies. The shared interest of these cultural practices in the
representation of civic space is interrogated to reveal an understanding of the city
as comprising !oth built environment and social body which informs the
deployment of the city as a subject of cartographic representation.
The next chapter analyses the costume book in the context of a Europewide
project of geographical description. The production of a clothed body
capable of articulating spatial and hierarchical difference is examined in relation to
the available ceremonial models for the negotiation of these intersecting axes of
description and the tensions generated by this representational strategy
The final chapter undertakes a reinvestigation of the Earl of Essex's
rebellion, reading a wide range of materials to argue for the centrality of anxieties
over the control of the civic sign to the understanding of this event.
Authors
Gordon, Andrew David HamiltonCollections
- Theses [3702]