Gossip at Paul’s Walking Author Dominic Carlone Markup Editor Kate LeBere Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3

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 Provider: University of Victoria Database: The Map of Early Modern London Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8" TY - ELEC A1 - Carlone, Dominic ED - Jenstad, Janelle T1 - Gossip at Paul’s Walking T2 - The Map of Early Modern London ET - 7.0 PY - 2022 DA - 2022/05/05 CY - Victoria PB - University of Victoria LA - English UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/GOSS2.htm UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/GOSS2.xml ER - Carlone, Dominic. Gossip at Paul’s Walking. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/GOSS2.htm. Carlone, Dominic. Gossip at Paul’s Walking. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/GOSS2.htm. Carlone, D. 2022. Gossip at Paul’s Walking. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/GOSS2.htm. Born digital. Bald, R.C. John Donne: A Life. New York: Oxford, 1970. Print. Douglas-Irvine, Miss H. Cathedral of St. Paul. The Victoria History of London. Ed. William F. Page. Vol. 1. London: Constable, 1909. 409–432. Print. Shakespeare, William. Richard the Third (Modern). Ed. Adrian Kiernander. Internet Shakespeare Editions. U of Victoria. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/Texts/R3/. Thomson, Elizabeth, ed. The Chamberlain Letters. New York: Putnam, 1965. Print. St. Paul’s Cathedral

St. Paul’s Cathedral was—and remains—an important church in London. In 962, while London was occupied by the Danes, St. Paul’s monastery was burnt and raised anew. The church survived the Norman conquest of 1066, but in 1087 it was burnt again. An ambitious Bishop named Maurice took the opportunity to build a new St. Paul’s, even petitioning the king to offer a piece of land belonging to one of his castles (Times 115). The building Maurice initiated would become the cathedral of St. Paul’s which survived until the Great Fire of London.

(STPA2.xml) London

The city of London, not to be confused with the allegorical character (London).

(LOND5.xml)

Though it was still a functioning church, St. Paul’s was also a centre of trade and socializing for early modern Londoners. This phenomenon, known as Paul’s-walking, made Paul’s the centre for the dissemination of news, true or false, in early modern London.

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Author A person or organization chiefly responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a work, usually printed text. This term may also be used when more than one person or body bears such responsibility. MoEML uses the term author to designate a contributor who is wholly or partly responsible for the original content of either a born-digital document, such as an encyclopedia entry, or a primary source document, such as a MoEML Library text. Data manager A person or organization responsible for managing databases or other data sources. MoEML uses the term data manager to designate contributors who maintain and manage our databases. They add and update the data sent to us by external contributors or found by MoEML team members. They also monitor journals and sources regularly to ensure that our databases are current. Markup editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. MoEML uses the code mrk both for the primary encoder(s) and for the person who edits the encoding. MoEML’s normal workflow includes a step whereby encoders check each other’s work. We use the term encoder to designate the principal encoder, and markup editor to designate the person who checks the encoding. Project director A person or organization with primary responsibility for all essential aspects of a project, or that manages a very large project that demands senior level responsibility, or that has overall responsibility for managing projects, or provides overall direction to a project manager. MoEML’s Project Director directs the intellectual and scholarly aspects of the project, consults with the Advisory and Editorial Boards, and ensures the ongoing funding of the project. Programmer A person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. MoEML uses the term programmer to designate a person or organization responsible for the creation and/or maintenance of computer program design documents, source code, and machine-executable digital files and supporting documentation. Research team head A person who directed or managed a research project. MoEML uses the terms research term head and assistant project manager interchangeably. Updated legacy encoding. Standardized <respStmt>s for JENS1, MCFI1, and HOLM3 and added TAKE1 as Junior Programmer. Added XInclude for <listPrefixDef> in the header. Added global publicationStmt through XInclude. Eliminated superfluous catRef elements from the header. Put <change> elements inside <revisionDesc> into the correct (latest first) order. Added <profileDesc> containing document type information expressed in <catRef> elements. Converted @rend to @style, through XSLT transformation. Transformed existing <byline> elements into a <respStmt> element in the header. Left <byline> elements in place for the moment. Added <front> element with <docTitle> as part of a normalization process. This will be used as the definitive page title on rendering. Added Dominic Carlone’s XML:id. Corrected quotation to match ISE text of Richard the Third (modern) and added link to ISE page. Transferred content from original location, STPA2.xml. Gossip at Paul’s Walking
This is the indictment of the good Lord Hastings, Which in a set hand fairly is engrossed That it may be this day read over in Paul’s. And mark how well the sequel hangs together[.] Shakespeare, Richard III 3.6.1–4

Richard III is a play about rumour and gossip. The events depicted in the play took place over a hundred years before Shakespeare wrote about them. Even in 1483, such a proclamation could reasonably have been expected to be made at St. Paul’s. However, this mention would have rung with contemporary significance in the ears of Shakespeare’s audience members, for, in Elizabethan and early Stuart London, the great temple of rumour and gossip was St. Paul’s.

Though it was still a functioning church, St. Paul’s was also a centre of trade and socializing for early modern Londoners. Francis Osborne gives the following account of a phenomenon known as Paul’s-walking: It was the fashion of those times, and did so continue till these for the principal gentry, lords, courtiers, and men of all professions not merely mechanic, to meet in Paul’s Church by eleven and walk in the middle aisle till twelve, and after dinner from three to six, during which times some discoursed on business, others of news. Now in regard of the universal commerce there happened little that did not first or last arrive here And those news-mongers, as they called them, did not only take the boldness to weigh the public but most intrinsic actions of the state, which some courtier or other did betray to this society. qtd. in Thomson 1

This is the atmosphere in which John Chamberlain found the material for his famous Letters. Chamberlain lived in the vicinity of Paul’s and spent a great deal of his time at Paul’s-walking taking in the hot gossip of the day, which was, thankfully, preserved for us in his letters.

The din and clamor of Paul’s secular uses was a serious annoyance to those who still wanted to use the church as a church. Pilkington gives a testimony of the state of Paul’s in 1561, with a perspective less tolerant than Osborne’s: the south alley for usury and poperey, the north for sorcery, and the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payments of money, are so well known to all men as the beggar knows his dish. qtd. in Douglas-Irvine 417

We must take such an account with a grain of salt, but there is an essential truth conveyed in it; the combination of sacred and secular at St. Paul’s was a marriage made in hell. In the time of John Donne’s deanship, visitors met to exchange gossip at Paul’s, and even brought their children to play there. Combined with the noise of tradespeople, this social activity made mass in the adjacent choir almost impossible (Bald 403).

For better or for worse, Paul’s was the centre for the dissemination of news, true or false, in early modern London. In all likelihood, its vast throngs of tradespeople and gossipers grossly outnumbered its parishioners on any given day. Shakespeare’s Richard III, a master of spinning lies, knew that the place to transform rumour into truth was Paul’s. An inveterate gossip like Chamberlain was in heaven there, but a simple churchgoer was in hell.

Participants Kate LeBere Kate LeBere KL

Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. During her time at MoEML, Kate made significant contributions to the 1598 and 1633 editions of Stow’s Survey of London, old-spelling anthology of mayoral shows, and old-spelling library texts. She authored the MoEML’s first Project Management Manual and "quickstart" guidelines for new employees and helped standardize the Personography and Bibliography. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

 Joey Takeda Joey Takeda JT

Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.

 Tye Landels-Gruenewald Tye Landels-Gruenewald TLG

Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.

 Cameron Butt Cameron Butt CB

Research Assistant, 2012–2013. Cameron Butt completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2013. He minored in French and has a keen interest in Shakespeare, film, media studies, popular culture, and the geohumanities.

 Kim McLean-Fiander Kim McLean-Fiander KMF

Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to The Map of Early Modern London from the Cultures of Knowledge digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, where she was the editor of Early Modern Letters Online, an open-access union catalogue and editorial interface for correspondence from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is currently Co-Director of a sister project to EMLO called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO). In the past, she held an internship with the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, completed a doctorate at Oxford on paratext and early modern women writers, and worked a number of years for the Bodleian Libraries and as a freelance editor. She has a passion for rare books and manuscripts as social and material artifacts, and is interested in the development of digital resources that will improve access to these materials while ensuring their ongoing preservation and conservation. An avid traveler, Kim has always loved both London and maps, and so is particularly delighted to be able to bring her early modern scholarly expertise to bear on the MoEML project.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad JJ

Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and PI of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. She has taught at Queen’s University, the Summer Academy at the Stratford Festival, the University of Windsor, and the University of Victoria. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media (Routledge). She has prepared a documentary edition of John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Elizabethan Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism, and The Silver Society Journal. Her book chapters have appeared (or will appear) in Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Brill, 2004), Shakespeare, Language and the Stage, The Fifth Wall: Approaches to Shakespeare from Criticism, Performance and Theatre Studies (Arden/Thomson Learning, 2005), Approaches to Teaching Othello (Modern Language Association, 2005), Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007), New Directions in the Geohumanities: Art, Text, and History at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2011), Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter, 2016), Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives (MLA, 2015), Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana, 2016), Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota, 2017), and Rethinking Shakespeare’s Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018).

 Martin D. Holmes Martin D. Holmes MDH

Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.

 Dominic Carlone Dominic Carlone DC

Hypertext student at the University of Windsor in Fall 1999. Shakespeare student at the University of Windsor in Winter 2000. Dominic Carlone was one of the three students who created the first version of MoEML in 1999.

 John Chamberlain John Chamberlain

Letter writer.

ODNB Wikipedia John Donne John Donne

Writer and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Father of Constance Alleyn.

MoEML EB ODNB Wikipedia Francis Osborne Francis Osborne

Writer.

ODNB Wikipedia Richard III Richard III King of England

King of England and Lord of Ireland 1483-1485.

EB ODNB Wikipedia William Shakespeare William Shakespeare

Playwright and poet.

EB ODNB Wikipedia James Pilkington James Pilkington Bishop of Durham

Bishop of Durham 1561–1576.

ODNB Wikipedia