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This book explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and political status of London’s crafts and craftsmen was embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual, and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London’s artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city, and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly upon their own distinctive individual and collective identities. The book identifies and examines a significant cultural development hitherto overlooked by social and architectural historians: a movement to enlarge, beautify, and rebuild livery company halls in the City of London from the mid-sixteenth century to the start of the English civil wars. By exploring these re-building projects in depth, the book throws new light on artisanal cultural production and self-presentation in England’s most diverse and challenging urban environment. Craft company halls became multifunctional sites for knowledge production, social and economic organisation, political exchange, and collective memorialisation. The forms, uses, and perceptions of company halls worked to define relationships and hierarchies within the guild, and shaped its external civic and political relations. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design, and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural, and urban history, and those interested in design and architectural history.
indication of this affinity is a curious swap of epistemic affiliations. While Dorian Gray roots himself in Renaissance knowledge culture, Shakespeare’s changeling is adopted into the image store of Victorian popular science. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Caliban became the Shakespearean icon of Darwinism. He is identified as such in Caliban: Shakespeare’s Missing
knowledge cultures of artisans in England's early modern metropolis. Crafting identities A major aim of this book is to identify and examine a significant cultural development hitherto overlooked by social and architectural historians: a City-wide movement to enlarge, beautify, and rebuild company halls from the mid-sixteenth century to the start of the English civil wars. These were expensive, highly visible, and time-consuming projects in which London's leading artisans played key roles as commissioners, advisors, and
Britain, and the saviour of British building from the long winter of the Elizabethan style’. 14 This chapter is not concerned with aesthetic evaluations of architectural style, but instead considers artisanal practices and interactions on the building site. If we broaden our focus from rarefied texts of architectural theory, authored and translated by gentlemen, to evidence of practice and engagement on work sites, then a very different picture of knowledge cultures emerges. Records
This book of essays on British social and cultural history since the eighteenth century draws attention to relatively neglected topics including personal and collective identities, the meanings of place, especially locality, and the significance of cultures of association. The essays capture in various ways the cultural meanings of political and civic life, from their expression in eighteenth-century administrative practices, to the evolving knowledge cultures of county historical societies, the imaginative and material construction of place reputations and struggles to establish medical provision for the working-class in the face of entrenched special interests. They also explore the changing relationship between the state and the voluntary sector in the twentieth-century and the role of popular magazines and the press in mediating and shaping popular opinion in an era of popular democracy. It is of interest that several of the essays take Manchester or Lancashire as their focus. Themes range from rural England in the eighteenth century to the urbanizing society of the nineteenth century; from the Home Front in the First World War to voluntary action in the welfare state; from post 1945 civic culture to the advice columns of teenage magazines and the national press. Various aspects of civil society connect these themes notably: the different identities of place, locality and association that emerged with the growth of an urban environment during the nineteenth century and the shifting landscape of public discourse on social welfare and personal morality in the twentieth-century.
This chapter outlines some of the characteristics of the ‘postmodern condition’ as defined by Jean-François Lyotard. The cultural condition of postmodernity, which emerges with late capitalism, has led to a dislocation of our accepted political reality. Instead of the universal discourses and ‘metanarratives’ of the past, which were founded on the rational certainties of the Enlightenment, there is a severing of the social bond and a general sense of fragmentation in the fields of knowledge, culture, and social relations. This chapter examines the two main responses to the decline of the metanarrative: the ‘foundationalist’ approach, exemplified by Jürgen Habermas, and the anti-foundationalist or broadly termed ‘poststructuralist’ strategy, which seeks to question these foundations. It also examines nihilism, poststructuralism, universality and the role it plays in radical politics.
the CAP fully explain such a dearth of alternative farm enterprises. The role of diverse forms of farming knowledge and knowledge cultures must also be considered. This chapter explores the ways in which different forms of farming knowledges are produced, disseminated and influence farmers’ willingness or ability to make changes to their farming systems. The chapter adopts two concepts from Morgan and Murdoch (2000): a simple classification of forms of knowledge, and the idea of networks to help understand relations among possessors of knowledge and the process of
In this broad sweep, Mayo explores dominant European discourses of higher education, in the contexts of different globalisations and neoliberalism, and examines its extension to a specific region. It explores alternatives in thinking and practice including those at the grassroots, also providing a situationally grounded project of university–community engagement. Signposts for further directions for higher education lifelong learning, with a social justice purpose, are provided.
, no doubt in large measure a consequence of the mounting financial pressure applied by the Crown to a ‘hard-pressed citizenry’ in the form of forced loans. 9 A new focus upon rebuilding projects at all stages of their development – from construction sites to furnished halls, negotiated by journeymen, masters, and civic elites – has also illuminated significant features of metropolitan artisanal knowledge cultures. Skilled craftsmen, including those engaged
and values from far right political parties? A sixth issue is about the notion of a knowledge economy. Is there more than one knowledge economy (Shore and Wright, 2017)? Are there knowledge cultures as well as knowledge economies? Is higher education for a knowledge economy a good or a bad thing? What has happened to knowledge for its own sake –is that an unrescuable property? Should lifelong learning move well away from notions of knowledge economies? Finally, where do research and interdisciplinarity fit into lifelong learning? Is research only for the privileged