During the last two decades the interests of scholars of early drama and of urban historians have found common ground in the study of urban celebration and ceremonial. For the student of early drama the beginnings of this interest coincided with a redefinition of the area and nature of the study of early drama, a shift in emphasis from the textual and literary problems of the few extant dramatic texts to the circumstances and conditions of their performance. Signalled in the mid-1950s by F.M. Salter's revealing study of the production of Chester's Whitsun plays, this movement gained impetus from Glynne Wickham's investigations of the development of English stagecraft between 1300 and 1660, the first volume of which appeared in 1959, which illustrated the interdependence of a range of ostensibly disparate activities, such as plays, royal entries and tournaments. Then, in the 1970s an iconoclastic challenge to traditional theories about the staging of mystery plays was mounted by Alan H. Nelson, drawing upon various local records, and from the resulting controversies was born a new initiative, the Records of Early English Drama, whose avowed purpose is ‘to find, transcribe, and publish external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. That series is still ongoing and already constitutes a major primary resource of regional documentary transcripts for all interested in early dramatic and quasidramatic activity, suggesting a hitherto unsuspected diversity and frequency of dramatic activity throughout England.

In 1613 the learned divine Dr Andrew Willet remarked on the number of London churches that had recently been rebuilt, commenting that ‘generally all of them have beene more Beautified and adorned in the space of twenty or thirty yeeres than in an hundred yeeres before’. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the subject of church building in Jacobean London has attracted little attention. Yet the detailed examination of such building provides special insight into the way parishioners viewed themselves and their community.

The popularization of ‘World City’ as an analytical concept dates to 1966. Taking up a term introduced fifty years earlier by Patrick Geddes, Peter Hall's now classic description of The World Cities explored the evolution of a handful of key urban areas from national into global roles and functions. The original emphasis on size and comprehensive economic functins has since been extended by the argument that a distinct class of global cities are a characteristic product of the technologies and economy of the late twentieth century. As well, such cities are thought to embrace common spatial forms that respond to a specific balance of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in the location of commercial, financial, and manufacturing industries.

Urban women are provocative; their mere presence has frequently stimulated observers to label the relationship between women and urban culture problematic. As Mary P. Ryan recently noted, ‘To search for women in public is to subvert a longstanding tenent of the modern Western gender system, the presumption that social space is divided between the public and the private and that men claim the former while women are confined to the latter.’ What follows here is an examination of the changing discourse of the relationship between women and cities since the Civil War. Perhaps for the reason indicated by Ryan, few systematic surveys have been made of that literature. Only those works which explicitly posit a connection between women and urban culture are included here; it is not enough that the women described be in cities, there must be some discussion of the interaction between the two. The term ‘culture’ is used in the anthropological sense – culture as a way of life. Many of the works reviewed here examine women who somehow deviate from the ‘ideal’ woman, who in the nineteenth century seemed to be a married Protestant middle-class non-employed mother. Thus they demonstrate abundant interest in prostitutes, immigrant women and wage-earning women, as well as in politically and sexually radical women.