The Religious Marketplace: Public Disputations in Civil War and Interregnum England

Abstract

Abstract The civil wars and interregnum (1640–60) ushered in a period of religious flux and debate, with controversies pursued in fierce pamphlet wars. Equally important, but far less familiar to us, were the public disputations, which spread across England and Wales to become a significant aspect of the religious culture of the age. This article traces their antecedents in the European tradition of university disputation, in the sixteenth-century continental Reformation and in England. The civil-war disputations represented a dramatically new development, in their number and scale, in their genuinely open character, and in the participation of lay preachers, especially Baptists and Quakers. The article explores their appeal for separatist evangelists—and for the huge audiences they attracted—and the factors that could drive parish ministers, often reluctantly, to accept a radical’s challenge. About fifty disputations generated printed narratives, and often also rival accounts, which throw new light on the relationship between oral and print culture in this period. The article explores how editors shaped texts to sway reader reaction, and uses these texts for insights into debating tactics and audience participation. Disputations also offer new evidence in the ongoing debate over the emergence of the ‘public sphere’. In their formal procedures, social inclusivity and geographical spread they far surpass Habermas’s coffee-house milieu, but this was a rough public arena far removed from the world of bourgeois politeness. And with live debates often triggering new pamphlet-wars, we can identify a public sphere in which oral and print culture coalesced.