SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023

Janelle Jenstad and Co-Applicants Martin Holmes and Mark Kaethler were awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for 2018-2023 for a new project called Walking Texts in Early Modern London. The links below will take you to pages explaining more about our team and setting out our plans for the two key parts of the project.

Summary from Fall 2017 SSHRC Insight Grant Application

John Stow’s Survey and the mayoral shows articulate a shared vision of London, sanctioned by its oligarchy and written on the streetscape. Stow and his literary successors traced the boundaries of the 26 wards in words. They guide readers imaginatively along the streets of London, lingering like good tour guides at locations of historical interest and traversing the past below street level. The peripatetic mayoral shows were performed annually in those same streets; as the new mayor returned from Westminster with his entourage, he became the main actor and principal audience for exhortations, spectacle, and reenacted history that idealized the relationship between the mayor, the city, and the people. Although the Survey is perambulatory chorography and the shows are semi-dramatic narrative, both were sponsored by London’s twelve great livery companies, dedicated to London’s mayors, given as gifts to the same readers, and written by a group of poets, playwrights, and historians who knew each other and mined each other’s historiographies. Our team sees both Survey and shows as official walking texts in that they name and historicize the spaces and places of London in similar ways. Our project will make clear the mutual aims of these distinct genres by recreating—in MoEML’s richly linked digital space—the robust network of intertextual references created by these cultural productions.
We will:
  1. Prepare a dynamic digital anthology of the 4 editions of the Survey and 32 extant pageant books.
  2. Tag and geolocate all the placenames, places of performance, and implied movements in the Survey and the books.
  3. Situate the Survey and shows in the critical, documentary, and historical contexts necessary to understand their mutual interdependence and platial significance.
  4. Optimize the texts for computational analysis so that we can version the four editions of the Survey and partition the shows into the individual place-based pageants.
  5. Prototype a new type of edition: the polychronic peripatetic edition that breaks the book and attaches texts, data, and digital artifacts to routes and points on a map.
Our project vastly increases the literary accessibility and historiographical value of the Survey and shows for students, scholars, and historians. We will produce the first scholarly paratexts for Stow’s 1598 Survey, the first digital-critical edition of the 1603 edition, and the first ever editions of 1618 and 1633. We will publish the first scholarly editions of many of the pageant books, the first complete anthology of all mayoral shows, and, in 24 cases, the first modern-spelling editions. We will make the 1598, 1618, and 1633 texts of the Survey as readily available for research and teaching as the 1603 final, authorial text. We will make the eyewitness accounts of the show and the contextual records of their making as accessible as the printed pageant books. We will link the Survey to its sources collected in the Stow’s Books project. Tracing the full extent of the borrowings and allusions between these texts will reveal how these documents work in tandem to imbue London place names with significance, cultivate an ongoing secular identity for the city through historiography and shared narratives, and use print to write this civic identity in peripatetic fashion. These expanding, collaboratively written, palimpsestic walks, where footprints and words trace the same route with incremental variations and memorial accretions, afford opportunities to study collaboration, adaptation, and narrative form. Full awareness of their rhetorical techniques and writing of place will help us mine these histories more carefully when we use them to understand London’s changing demographics and infrastructure.

Cite this page

MLA citation

Jenstad, Janelle. SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023. The Map of Early Modern London, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 20 Jun. 2018, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SSHRC2018.htm.

Chicago citation

Jenstad, Janelle. SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023. The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed June 20, 2018. http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SSHRC2018.htm.

APA citation

Jenstad, J. 2018. SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London. Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SSHRC2018.htm.

RIS file (for RefMan, EndNote etc.)

Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

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A1  - Jenstad, Janelle
ED  - Jenstad, Janelle
T1  - SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023
T2  - The Map of Early Modern London
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/06/20
CY  - Victoria
PB  - University of Victoria
LA  - English
UR  - http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SSHRC2018.htm
UR  - http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/xml/standalone/SSHRC2018.xml
ER  - 

RefWorks

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SR Electronic(1)
A1 Jenstad, Janelle
A6 Jenstad, Janelle
T1 SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2023
T2 The Map of Early Modern London
WP 2018
FD 2018/06/20
RD 2018/06/20
PP Victoria
PB University of Victoria
LA English
OL English
LK http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SSHRC2018.htm

TEI citation

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