The largest and wealthiest friary in England, Blackfriars was not only a
religious institution but also a cultural, intellectual, and political centre of London. The friary housed
London’s Dominican friars (known in England as the Black friars) after their move from
the smaller Blackfriars precincts in Holborn. The Dominicans’ aquisition of the site,
overseen by Robert Kilwardby, began in 1275.
Before occupying the site, however, they had to negotiate the demolition and reconstruction
of the section of the City Wall
that ran directly through it, north-south from Ludgate to the Thames. With the support of the
Archbishop, Edward I, and London’s mayor, the new wall was completed, and a large portion of the
Thames was reclaimed over the next thirty years. Once completed, the precinct was second
in size only to
St. Paul’s Churchyard, spanning eight acres from the Fleet to St. Andrew’s Hill
and from Ludgate to the Thames. Blackfriars remained a political
and social hub, hosting councils and even parlimentary proceedings, until its surrender
in
1538 pursuant to Henry VIII’s Dissolution
of the Monasteries (Holder 27–56).
A survey of the Blackfriars precincts (Harben Plate 3).
Holder, Nick. The Friaries of Medieval London: From
Foundation to Dissolution. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017.
Studies in the History of Medieval Religion. Print.
Blackfriars (Farringdon Within).The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLAC1.htm. INP.
Chicago citation
Blackfriars (Farringdon Within).The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLAC1.htm. INP.
APA citation
2022. Blackfriars (Farringdon Within). In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/BLAC1.htm. INP.
RIS file (for RefMan, RefWorks, EndNote etc.)
Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
TY - ELEC
ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Blackfriars (Farringdon Within)
T2 - The Map of Early Modern London
ET - 7.0
PY - 2022
DA - 2022/05/05
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLAC1.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/BLAC1.xml
TY - UNP
ER -
TEI citation
<bibl type="mla"> <title level="a">Blackfriars (Farringdon Within)</title>. <title
level="m">The Map of Early Modern London</title>, Edition <edition>7.0</edition>,
edited by <editor><name ref="#JENS1"><forename>Janelle</forename> <surname>Jenstad</surname></name></editor>,
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<ref target="https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLAC1.htm">mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/BLAC1.htm</ref>.
INP.</bibl>
Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Chris Horne was an honours student in the
Department of English at the University of Victoria. His primary research interests
included
American modernism, affect studies, cultural studies, and digital humanities.
Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017.
Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department
of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in
English
(with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary
research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature,
critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Joey Takeda authored or edited the following items in MoEML’s bibliography:
Jenstad, Janelle and Joseph Takeda. Making the RA Matter: Pedagogy, Interface, and Practices.Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jentery Sayers. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Print.
Research Assistant, 2017-2019. Chase Templet was a graduate student at the University
of Victoria in the Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) stream. He was specifically
focused on early modern repertory studies and non-Shakespearean early modern drama,
particularly the works of Thomas Middleton.
Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate
honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015.
Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander
comes
to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge
digital humanities project at the University of
Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union
catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the
curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare
Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on
paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor.
She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts,
and is
interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these
materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler,
Kim
has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able
to bring
her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer
Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of
Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A
Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If
You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and
Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies,
Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan
Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance
Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book
chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early
Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage,
The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre
Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching
Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity
in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the
Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early
Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern
English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names:
Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making
Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking
Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies
(Routledge, 2018).
Janelle Jenstad authored or edited the following items in MoEML’s bibliography:
Jenstad, Janelle and Joseph Takeda. Making the RA Matter: Pedagogy, Interface, and Practices.Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jentery Sayers. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Building a Gazetteer for Early Modern London, 1550-1650.Placing Names. Ed. Merrick Lex Berman, Ruth
Mostern, and Humphrey Southall. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2016. 129-145.
Jenstad, Janelle. The
Burse and the Merchant’s Purse: Coin, Credit, and the Nation in Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody.The
Elizabethan Theatre XV. Ed. C.E. McGee and A.L.
Magnusson. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 2002. 181–202.
Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. The City Cannot Hold You: Social Conversion in the Goldsmith’s
Shop.Early Modern Literary Studies 8.2 (2002): 5.1–26..
Jenstad, Janelle. The Gouldesmythes Storehowse: Early Evidence for
Specialisation.The Silver Society Journal 10 (1998): 40–43.
Jenstad, Janelle. Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil
Family, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 373–403. doi:10.1215/10829636–34–2–373.
Jenstad, Janelle. Public
Glory, Private Gilt: The Goldsmiths’ Company and the Spectacle of Punishment.Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society. Ed.
Anne Goldgar and Robert Frost. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 191–217. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Smock
Secrets: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage.Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Ed. Katherine
Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 87–99. Print.
Jenstad, Janelle. Using
Early Modern Maps in Literary Studies: Views and Caveats from London.GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. Ed.
Michael Dear, James Ketchum, Sarah
Luria, and Doug Richardson. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Stow, John. A SVRVAY OF
LONDON. Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate, and description
of that Citie, written in the yeare 1598. by Iohn Stow Citizen of London. Also an
Apologie (or defence) against the opinion of some men, concerning that Citie, the
greatnesse thereof. With an Appendix, containing in Latine, Libellum de situ &
nobilitate Londini: written by William Fitzstephen, in the raigne of Henry the
second. Ed. Janelle Jenstad and
the MoEML Team. MoEML. Transcribed.
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC).
Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database
implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the
project
and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant
on
MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
Standing just west of Holborn Bridge, the site that would become the original Blackfriars
precinct was acquired by the Dominican friars (known in England as the Black friars) circa
1223 through a donation from
Hubert de Burgh. Over the next forty years, the friary expanded westward to Shoe Lane
and southward along the Fleet to Smallbridge Lane. By the
1270s, the site occupied 4 acres and
contained a church, a chapter house, and one or two wings of accommodation. The friars
left the Holborn friary in the
1280s to establish
a new friary, Blackfriars (Farringdon Within), on a more prestigious site. The Holborn site was sold in
1286 to Henry de Lacy
(Holder 1–26).
Blackfriars (Holborn) is mentioned in the following documents:
Surrounding St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Paul’s Churchyard has had a multi-faceted history in use and function, being the location of burial,
crime, public gathering, and celebration. Before its destruction during the civil
war, St. Paul’s Cross was located in the middle of the churchyard, providing a place for preaching and
the delivery of Papal edicts (Thornbury).
St. Paul’s Churchyard is mentioned in the following documents:
Perhaps more than any other geophysical feature, the Thames river has directly affected London’s growth and rise to prominence; historically, the city’s economic, political, and
military importance was dependent on its riverine location. As a tidal river, connected
to the North Sea, the Thames allowed for transportation to and from the outside world; and, as the longest river
in England, bordering on nine counties, it linked London to the country’s interior. Indeed, without the Thames, London would not exist as one of Europe’s most influential cities. The Thames, however, is notable for its dichotomous nature: it is both a natural phenomenon
and a cultural construct; it lives in geological time but has been the measure of
human history; and the city was built around the river, but the river has been reshaped
by the city and its inhabitants.
The Thames is mentioned in the following documents:
Originally built as a Roman fortification for the provincial city of Londinium in the second century C.E., the London Wall remained a material and spatial boundary for the city throughout the early modern
period. Described by Stow as high and great (Stow 1:8), the London Wall dominated the cityscape and spatial imaginations of Londoners for centuries. Increasingly,
the eighteen-foot high wall created a pressurized constraint on the growing city;
the various gates functioned as relief valves where development spilled out to occupy
spaces outside the wall.
Agas Map
