Introduction: Gendered Geographies of Vice

Abstract

Scholars have detailed the vast and sprawling nature of late sixteenth-century London, which as the third largest city in all of Europe daily absorbed a steady influx of strangers from England and the Continent.1 In 100 years, between 1550 and 1650, the city’s population expanded from 80,000 to 400,000. By 1700, over half a million people lived in London.2 One historian describes early modern London as “a city packed with people.”3 Although observations about London’s rapid population growth typically frame discussions of the period’s sweeping economic and social changes, only recently have we begun to relate general trends in urban growth to city-dwellers’ specific, everyday lived experiences. Ian Munro in his book on the crowd, for instance, considers “the phenomenological implications of population growth in the city” and asks us to attend to “the visible and tangible presence of more and more bodies.”4 In her comparative analysis of early modern London and Paris, Karen Newman explores a new politics of proximity that heralded an awareness of urban space as constituted by and constitutive of social relations: The new space of the metropolis, the relentless saturation of what had been only recently empty and open spaces, the promiscuous encounters of the urban pedestrian, and the need to reduce spatial barriers and provide access to newly developing market spaces breached status boundaries and not only generated profound anxiety about order and place but also fueled the production of “the subject as an individuell” that will eventually become Jameson’s enlightenment subject and Ferguson’s romantic consciousness.5