Materializing the public sphere in American religious history

Abstract

AbstractThis article reviews scholarship in American religious history around the concept of the public sphere. Considering that the public sphere was readily aligned with the productions of the printing press, ‘materializing’ surveys works that have relied upon, expanded, and critiqued print's centraility to early American religious public culture. Recent attention to materiality has also encouraged greater attention to contingencies, locality of circulation, and specificity of audiences in our studies of public texts that would trouble technological determinisms that readily aligned Protestant ascendance, secular modernity, and print publishing with democratization. The essay concludes with new questions regarding print culture, calls for greater multimedia approaches to our study of media objects, and posits the importance of critically evaluating what we count as public or private in our historical narratives about religious communities.