Legendary London

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Placenames often survive the buildings or features they mark—especially in cities with a Great Fire or a Blitz in their past: there is now no brook at Walbrook, or gate at Ludgate, but the names and the stories associated with them live on. In this class we will explore the stories that late-medieval, early modern, and a few modern people associated with a selection of names, places, and artifacts in and near London: ones that for them were familiar but also evoked what was already a distant past, when giants inhabited Britain, when Brut the Trojan founded the city that would become London, when Christianity first came to the island, when Merlin built Stonehenge, when King Cnut tried to tell the Thames what to do, when King Edward the Confessor witnessed miracles at Westminster . . . How did these stories help Londoners conceive of themselves and their past? How have these stories been transformed over time? What can we learn from them about our own senses of place, history, and self? We will spend the semester exploring places in and near London where the legendary past coexists with the present, in order to investigate the roles of both preservation and invention in deriving meaning and identity from places, names, and objects. We will analyze the kind of mental construction that accompanies, and can long outlast, a physical construction, but is also dynamic, subject to reconstruction according to the needs and anxieties of the day. And we will practice reading the built environment and landscape in ways that you will be able to put into practice wherever you go.