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Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris.

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Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris

By Karen Newman

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007

In Cultural Capitals, Karen Newman has given us a wide-ranging and invigorating investigation of how urbanization affected cultural production and urban sensibilities in early modern Paris and London. Newman selected these cities not only because of their rapid demographic growth and commercial and political importance, but also, as her title indicates, because they were crucial cultural centers. Books and ballads poured from the presses in both cities; theaters flourished; parks and bridges provided venues for new forms of urban sociability, and commercial structures such as the Royal Exchange and La Galerie du Palais put on offer an evermore-impressive range of consumer goods. Paris and London set the standard for fashionability whether in terms of clothing, manners, carriages, or cuisine.

Newman is a gifted expositor of the texture of early modern urban life. She is as interested in the problem of city dirt and how it affected the movements and sensibilities of urban dwellers as in the analysis of Madeleine de Scudery's romances, John Donne's poems of urban perambulation, or visual representations of the Pont Neuf. Cultural Capitals, then, has an unusually broad reach and embraces popular as well as elite cultural forms. At a time, moreover, when the number of comparative studies of early modern culture is dwindling, Newman's book is a striking exception. Because of her impressive linguistic skills,...

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