The 2022 Southeastern Renaissance Conference's theme of “sacred places, secular spaces” is a wonderfully rich premise. I use it here to organize some of my recent work on hell, London, and early modern print culture. I begin by considering hell's theological and cosmological status in terms of space and place. I then take up a series of aggressively intertextual pamphlets from the 1590s and 1600s to look at the ways in which their narrations of the infernal participate in one of the period's central conceptual frames for engaging with urban life: the city and/as/in proximity to hell. In addition to the many things these pamphlets accomplish, they bring the infernal to London—and London to the infernal—in print. I thus reflect on the unusually powerful intersection of hell and early modern print culture, on the capacity of print to make, quite literally, space and place for the infernal. The result is a repurposing of hell—what its foremost historian Alan Bernstein defines as “a divinely sanctioned place of eternal torment for the wicked”—for the fashioning of textual identities, communities, and values.

My efforts to connect hell and the book industry—a connection literalized in the period nickname “pressmen's devils” for the boys employed to hang printed sheets—are informed by my earlier work on Reformation disputes over the creedal statement that Christ descended into hell. Catholics understood the statement literally, believing that after his death Jesus went down to a real, material hell to combat Satan. Calvinists, in contrast, maintained that while on the cross Jesus suffered the genuine pains of a metaphorical hell in his soul. The controversy crystallizes hell's signifying potential in terms of place and space. It is either an otherworldly but decidedly situated place of punishment, or it is a worldly yet symbolic state of suffering. These spatial poles fit into longstanding Christian traditions of understanding hell literally as well as symbolically or psychologically, as both “eternal flames and … the unavailing remorse and chagrin of the damned.” Such understandings, to cite Bernstein again, always reflect a culture's shifting ideas about other concepts and problems, ideas “about death, the dead, the soul, justice, and retribution.” They also reflect, as Kristin Poole has shown so cogently, our period's “residual and emergent spatial epistemologies,” particularly ideas about the fluidity and fungibility of cosmic geography.