St. Mary the Virgin and the Birth of the Public Sphere

Abstract

This article considers the significance of the disputation in Elizabethan universities, a genre that has been ignored because it was rarely recorded and was in spoken Latin. Shuger outlines the occasions and format of disputations, which were prerequisites for most university degrees, and describes some common topics. Surprisingly, many of the politico-religious positions argued were controversial or heterodox. Shuger asks why such debates were tolerated, concluding that they were a nascent public sphere, which required the mask of formal debate roles because disputants could not argue heterodox positions in their own persons.