London Living

Abstract

London Living Matthew Boyd Goldie and Sarah Stanbury The essays in this forum on London's spaces are selected from the Twentieth Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society in July 2016. They were presented in Sarah Stanbury's "London Living" roundtable and other panels. They are partly historical and partly literary, taking up various aspects of London in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, Chaucer's life and works, and Thomas Hoccleve's Male regle. Sarah Crover interprets the Thames as both "benevolent" and "unruly," Laura Varnam perceives the city as bounded yet open, Martha Carlin notes that the new institutions of inns in London and Southwark enabled bringing different people together, Marion Turner sees enclosed rooms as nevertheless social spaces that "enabled creative production," and Samuel McMillan reads London as "a network" of competing "discursive practices," giving rise to an authorial voice that is communal. That is, they share an interest in historicizing London's "doublenesse," the features of its space that are similar and different, ambiguous, inconsistent, and that tend to repeat and multiply in unpredictable and unreliable ways. [End Page 377] Copyright © 2018 The New Chaucer Society, Saint Louis University