I may have been a bit quieter than usual last week, as I spent Thursday and Friday the Literary London 2006 conference. It was the first of these I’ve attended (although it probably won’t be the last), for it is a fascinating combination. Basically focused as the name suggests on literature, it is however, highly welcoming to interdisciplinary approaches, and ranges widely in timeframe, from current, very current, technological “art” back to, well the earliest paper this year was on Chaucer and the “shitty” place of Southwark in his London.

I also presented, for the first time, a paper myself, entitled “Exercises in rhetoric or genuine laments? Four accounts of a ‘bounteous Ladies large beneficence'”, about Dame Helen Branch. The session worked out rather nicely, since one of my fellow panel members, Adam Hanson, from Queen’s University Belfast, was speaking about “William Haughton’s London in Englishmen for my Money,” a play written in 1598, only four years after Dame Helen died, so the two papers were quite complementary, and I was able to refer to his map handout. (Thanks Adam! and thanks to all the commenters on this blog – particularly Clanger and Sharon – for all their help in the research that went into my paper.)

I’m not posting the paper here because I would like to get it published some time and posting might complicate that, but if anyone is interested I’d be happy to send you a copy.

The following is a short collection of notes from the sessions I attended. (Note, these are my thoughts and collected snippets, and should not necessarily be taken as a full reflection of what the speaker said. And I think they are accurate, but it was an intense two days. Caveat rector.)

“John Milton, London writer”: Patrick J. Cook, Washington University
He’s more of a London writer than you think, was the basic thesis. Women and London are both alluring and frightening – the combination explains why London starts as the source of all beauty and ends up as Circe’s cave. (Logical enough for a boy just up from a male-dominated Cambridge.)

Milton was a great walker, but became much more a walker in London after going blind he “became a blind version of John Stowe”. (And when you think about it walking about early modern London – the smells, the noise – manufacture, horses, carts, itinerant traders singing out their wares – must have been pretty amazing, and frightening.)
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