CFP: "City of Vice: London, 1500-1700"
3/12/07; Collection

Cultural historians have explored the ways that the city as both an
actual location and imagined landscape was perceived as a dangerous
place for women, whose movements beyond the confines of the domestic
cast them into an illicit world of material and erotic temptation. But
was the city, both real and imagined, also understood to be a place of
enticing possibility and anxious negotiation for men? To what extent
did full participation in city life in the early modern period
necessarily involve an indulgence in immoral or intemperate behavior?
We invite essay submissions for a collection focusing on early modern
London as a dangerous and alluring environment that influenced male
bodies and behaviors variously. Our working premise is that late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London was not merely
apprehended by male denizens and visitors as a location, but was also
experienced as a pervasive force. Urbanization provided the material
objects, social opportunities, and topographic sites for unique kinds of
pleasures and perils that challenged men's abilities to maintain the
moderation necessary to the ideals of civic manhood. We hope to explore
not only the moral and ethical disposition of vice but also the
relationship of vice to excess, the affective and the physiological
effects of vice, and the relationship between public and private
intemperance. Conceiving of vice as both degenerative and constitutive
of early modern urban manhood, we aim to consider the ways in which vice
is tied to the city within a variety of literary modes (for instance
popular satire, drama, ballads, poetry, sermons, and didactic
literature), as well as the ways in which representations of vice
construct London as a contested terrain of heterogeneous commercial
spaces peopled by diverse subjects. We welcome essays from a variety of
theoretical and disciplinary perspectives on topics that may include but
are not limited to the following:

• Behaviors associated with and/or the symptoms of a specific
vice: idleness, rioting, sodomy, wantonness, nightwalking, pandering,
gambling, prodigality, drunkenness, gluttony, smoking, sartorial
extravagance, and the promotion of social disorder
• Vice and the constitution of the public sphere/specific practices
as enabled by particular urban spaces: the street, the court, the
tavern, the prison, the church, the playhouse, the bawdy house, the
Royal and New Exchanges, the merchants' stalls, and the docks
• Ascribed causes of vice; inspirations for vice
• State and local regulation of vice
• Vice and material culture; vice and luxury; vice and the market
• Vice and appetite
• Vice and sin; the moral and/or religious register of vice
• Vice and comportment
• Vice as habit and/or vice as impulse
• Vice and age, gender, sexuality, status, ethnicity, race, and
religious background
• Vice as defect or disfigurement; vice as deformity or disability
• Vice and aliens, visitors, rural dwellers, and citizens
• Vice and subordination; vice and authority.
• Vice as subversive and/or vice as conservative.

Proposals or abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted by
March 12, 2007 by email to: roze.hentschell_at_colostate.edu *and*
amanda.bailey_at_uconn.edu. Completed papers will be due October 1, 2007.

Roze Hentschell
Assistant Professor Of English
Colorado State University

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Received on Sat Mar 03 2007 - 17:54:18 EST