During the last two decades the interests of scholarsof early drama and of urban historians have foundcommon ground in the study of urban celebration andceremonial. For the student of early drama thebeginnings of this interest coincided with aredefinition of the area and nature of the study ofearly drama, a shift in emphasis from the textualand literary problems of the few extant dramatictexts to the circumstances and conditions of theirperformance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M.Salter's revealing study of the production ofChester's Whitsun plays, this movement gainedimpetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of thedevelopment of English stagecraft between 1300 and1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959,which illustrated the interdependence of a range ofostensibly disparate activities, such as plays,royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s aniconoclastic challenge to traditional theories aboutthe staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H.Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and fromthe resulting controversies was born a newinitiative, the Records of Early English Drama,whose avowed purpose is ‘to find, transcribe, andpublish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial,and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’.That series is still ongoing and already constitutesa major primary resource of regional documentarytranscripts for all interested in early dramatic andquasidramatic activity, suggesting a hithertounsuspected diversity and frequency of dramaticactivity throughout England.

In 1613 the learned divine Dr Andrew Willet remarked onthe number of London churches that had recently beenrebuilt, commenting that ‘generally all of them havebeene more Beautified and adorned in the space oftwenty or thirty yeeres than in an hundred yeeresbefore’. It is somewhat surprising, then, that thesubject of church building in Jacobean London hasattracted little attention. Yet the detailedexamination of such building provides specialinsight into the way parishioners viewed themselvesand their community.

The popularization of ‘World City’ as an analyticalconcept dates to 1966. Taking up a term introducedfifty years earlier by Patrick Geddes, Peter Hall'snow classic description of The WorldCities explored the evolution of ahandful of key urban areas from national into globalroles and functions. The original emphasis on sizeand comprehensive economic functins has since beenextended by the argument that a distinct class ofglobal cities are a characteristic product of thetechnologies and economy of the late twentiethcentury. As well, such cities are thought to embracecommon spatial forms that respond to a specificbalance of centralizing and decentralizingtendencies in the location of commercial, financial,and manufacturing industries.

Urban women are provocative; their mere presence hasfrequently stimulated observers to label therelationship between women and urban cultureproblematic. As Mary P. Ryan recently noted, ‘Tosearch for women in public is to subvert alongstanding tenent of the modern Western gendersystem, the presumption that social space is dividedbetween the public and the private and that menclaim the former while women are confined to thelatter.’ What follows here is an examination of thechanging discourse of the relationship between womenand cities since the Civil War. Perhaps for thereason indicated by Ryan, few systematic surveyshave been made of that literature. Only those workswhich explicitly posit a connection between womenand urban culture are included here; it is notenough that the women described bein cities, there must be somediscussion of the interaction between the two. Theterm ‘culture’ is used in the anthropological sense– culture as a way of life. Many of the worksreviewed here examine women who somehow deviate fromthe ‘ideal’ woman, who in the nineteenth centuryseemed to be a married Protestant middle-classnon-employed mother. Thus they demonstrate abundantinterest in prostitutes, immigrant women andwage-earning women, as well as in politically andsexually radical women.