Early Modern Public Sphere Research Articles

Publicity and Persuasion in Early Modern England: The Babington Plot and its Aftermath, 1586‒88

Abstract: This article argues that the English Privy Council organised a persuasion campaign in the wake of the Babington Plot (1586). It examines a wealth of sources from a variety of genres, including prayers, sermons, ballads, and treatises, which are often analysed in isolation. It establishes the date of an anonymous sermon delivered at Paul’s Cross to condemn the Babington Plot, and it provides new information about the trials and executions of the traitors, making use of a little-known narrative written by the spy Maliverey Catilyn. The article reaffirms the traditional view that Tudor governments used popular propaganda to promote royal policy, which is of more utility than the theory of the ‘early modern public sphere’.

Women who reason in print: blazing worlds and blameless girls in early modern ballads

ABSTRACT Samuel Pepys complained that Margaret Cavendish’s visit to The Royal Society would result in London’s being ‘full of ballads of it’, but Cavendish might have delighted in such a reception by popular print. Pepys himself was an avid collector of these texts, which frequently represent women as capable thinkers and knowers who draw meaning and sustenance from the regular workings of nature. Illuminating the dimensions of an early modern public sphere and what we might now call a biosphere, ballads encourage audiences to envision both settings as appropriate places for women’s collective thought, action, and plans for the future. I argue that Cavendish’s Blazing World offers an expensive Folio edition of the methods and assumptions that many ballad women utilize. Drawing upon feminist social theory, ecofeminism, and scholarship about early modern ballads, I also propose that our understanding of natural philosophy and early modern reason should include the stories and findings of women who reason in print.

The Local and the Vocal. Tracing Vocality in Early 18th Century Print Media

The article outlines the entanglements of vocal, scriptural and print media practices in early 18th century Switzerland. It builds upon a close reading of media coverage of the 1712 Toggenburg war preserved in the Zurich central library (Zentralbibliothek Zürich). By tracing the vocality of early modern media culture in song pamphlets, ballad broadsheets and printed dialogues reflecting on contemporary events it argues that vocal media practices were not only literally inscribed in early modern prints but were also crucial for the dissemination of news and opinions. Essentially, the intermediality of the early modern public sphere appears as fundamentally characterized by the interplay of voices, texts and performance.

Invektive Affordanzen der Kommunikationsform Flugschrift

Abstract This paper deals with the so-called ‘Flugschrift’ (i. e. pamphlet) as a specific medial arrangement resp. form of communication in early modern age, which not only allowed a wide and rapid spread of popular texts, but also provided increased opportunities for follow-on communications and interactive debate. Interactivity is an essential dimension of invective communication. It is argued that the ‘Flugschriften’ afforded the escalative dynamics of invective, which shaped the early modern public sphere. These dynamics entailed furthermore distinctive connections and transformations of visual and rhetorical genres and practices in pamphlet literature. These correlations will be demonstrated by the examples of the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn debate and Luthers invectives against the papal bull ‘Exsurge Domine’.

“Fruits of Unrulie Multitudes”: Liberty, Popularity, and Meanings of Violence in the English Atlantic, 1623–1625

AbstractUsing neglected evidence of organized, state-like, internecine violence among English settlers in New England during the 1620s and 1630s, this essay engages with recent archipelagic approaches to the early modern English public sphere and with studies of the English state and political culture in order to argue for the existence of an important, semipublic Atlantic political discourse during the decades preceding the civil wars in the British Isles. It focuses on the distinctive political dynamics of Atlantic fishing stages during the early seventeenth century and on the violent confrontation between the Dorchester and Plymouth companies in 1625 over the control of the Cape Ann stage on Massachusetts Bay. The rumors, news, and formal reports that flowed from such incidents show how diffuse English ideologies assumed the form of opposed groups, armed and mobilized in the manner of free states, and confirmed fears of such violent episodes as threats to orderly governance in a political society conceived in Atlantic imperial terms. By examining the communication of and responses to this perceived threat during the late 1620s and 1630s, the essay reveals how an Atlantic discourse of “liberty,” “orderly commonweal,” and “popularity” influenced English political culture and policy and the institutions of Atlantic governance before the English Civil War.

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

<i>Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell</i>. Edited by Christopher D’Addario and Matthew C. Augustine. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+255.

Roy Porter Student Prize Essay How (Not) to Survive a Plague: The Theology of Fleeing Disease in Sixteenth-century England

Abstract Early modern medicine favoured flight as the best prophylactic against epidemic disease. Theologically, however, flight savoured of an attempt to defy divine providence, or a dereliction of Christian charity, while staying could seem an act of presumption or recklessness. This essay studies six theologians whose writings on the issue circulated in sixteenth-century England. Long dismissed as inconclusive and derivative, these ‘flight theologies’ can be better understood as products of theological principle and communal experience, whose combined influence precluded definitive prescriptions. Instead, authors marshalled the rhetoric of ‘conscience’ to displace the decision back onto their readers, while retaining interpretive authority over the key factors of Scripture and personal obligations. Flight theology thus seeks less to solve a practical problem, than to produce a particular kind of political subjectivity, bound to the community and predicated on persuasion. In so doing, the discourse fuelled the emergence of an early modern English public sphere.

Death of a Polemicist: Honour and Calumny in Early Modern European Religious Debate

Abstract This article proposes a novel interpretation of printed religious polemic in the context of European religious struggle in the Age of Reformations. While recent scholarship has underscored the virulence with which controversialists waged their doctrinal debates, I argue that such work has not yet acknowledged the structuring, autonomous role played by honour in religious polemic. To this end, I consider the case of Guillaume de Reboul, a Protestant-turned-Catholic polemicist who left France to take up service in the Roman Curia, before his arrest and execution under mysterious circumstances. First, I argue that the vocabularies of honour and calumny with which polemicists such as Reboul fashioned their texts played a role at least as important as that of theology, providing the motors which drove debates forward and many of the rules of the polemical game. Secondly, I consider Reboul’s writings as tactical moves in a broader strategy of personal, professional and confessional advancement. As Reboul’s case illustrates, writing was only one weapon among many in the polemical arsenal, and such debates represented forms of social struggle that could entail considerably more dangerous forms of conflict. Thirdly, I reconstruct the ecclesiastical, political and geopolitical landscapes which made a career like Reboul’s possible—and which made it possible to put authors like him to death when expedient. Fourthly, I consider how Reboul and his opponents’ printed appeals conjured into being a reading public. I argue that the culture of honour represented a defining feature of the early modern public sphere.

Political Participation in Early Stuart Ireland

AbstractA consideration of political participation in early Stuart Ireland suggests modifications to the prospectus outlined by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus in “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” By investigating the structures that facilitated public debates about politics in Ireland, as well as the factors that complicated it, this article challenges the periodization of the public sphere offered by Lake and Pincus and suggests that there is a clear need to integrate a transnational perspective. Unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, the majority of Ireland's population was Catholic. The flow of post-Tridentine Catholic ideas from the Continent and Anglo-Britannic political culture meant that competing ideas of what constituted the common good circulated widely in Ireland and led to debates about the nature of authority in the early modern Irish state. These divisions in Irish society created a distinctive kind of politics that created particularly unstable publics. Thus, Ireland's experience of the early modern public sphere differed considerably from concurrent developments in the wider archipelago.

Balls on walls, feet on streets: Subversive play in Grand Ducal Florence

This article draws attention to the social and political import of balls games and acts of play in the urban space of Grand Ducal Florence. At the same time that the Medici were commissioning artworks that rhetorically promoted a unified identity of Florence and a spectre of control over the city space through the apparatus of public games like calcio in livrea, young men engaged in transitory activities of play in the street that contributed to community identity and belonging in space. Teasing out the transgressive and political potential of the ludic apart from and apart of the festal demonstrates how games in the city produced moments of community in an early modern public sphere‐ a sphere carved out through use of and performance in urban space, a sphere sometimes contending with and in contention with legislation, control, and authority by the Grand Duchy. Play shaped the production, use, and meaning of the urban environment both in daily life and during special events. In turn, the city's socially invested topography contributed to the construction of Florentine identity, within, between, and beyond factions.

Ben Jonson's Antagonistic Style, Public Opinion, and Sejanus

This article places Ben Jonson's tragedy Sejanus His Fall (perf. 1603; pub. 1605) within a Catholic intellectual context that influenced the playwright during some of his most creative years, showing that the play's antagonistic style has previously unrecognized points of social and political relevance. Building on recent interest in the early modern public sphere, I argue that Jonson's famously combative style of drama offers a bold and original perspective on the experiences of English Catholics navigating public opinion in a society that could be deeply hostile to them.

Sten’ka Razin als Held, „edler Räuber“ oder Verbrecher? Interpretationen und Analogien in den Ausländerberichten zum Kosakenaufstand von 1667–1671

The article examines the reports of European contemporary authors about the uprising of Stepan Razin in 1667-1671, and their attempts to interpret the rebels’ motives. The main focus lies on the comparisons drawn by the observers between Razin’s rebellion and other European insurrections of the Early Modern period. The sources in question are broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets and books, i. e. those printed media genres which constituted and influenced the Early Modern public sphere. Three perception tendencies can be traced in the Razin discourse of the 1670s. First, the tendency to describe Razin as an ally of the Turkish Sultan, the Crimean Khan or the Persian Shah, and thus to depict the rebellion of the Don-Cossacks as part of the Oriental threat to the Christian world. The second view on Razin tended to show him as a ‘noble bandit’, i. e. an insurgent who nevertheless strove to protect the oppressed from the evildoings of the Russian elite. Finally, after the execution of Razin in June 1671 and the distribution of the official death-sentence, which was soon even translated into several European languages, Razin began to be perceived primarily as a conspirator against the state and a separatist. His revolt was then put on par with the other contemporary separatist movements in East Central and Eastern Europe (the Ukrainian revolt of hetman Doroshenko in 1667-1674, and the Croatian-Hungarian magnate conspiracy against the Habsburgs in 1670-1671). These rivaling views were reflected not only in textual descriptions, but also in images of Razin, which were circulated in various ways.

Discretion in The Early Modern Public Sphere:The Contention Betwyxte Churchyeard and Camell

Discretion in The Early Modern Public Sphere:<i>The Contention Betwyxte Churchyeard and Camell</i>

Intoxicated Reasons, Rational Feelings: Rethinking the Early Modern English Public Sphere

AbstractThis article examines early modern English public houses and related period miscellany—broadside ballads, conduct books, and songs—to more closely investigate the discourses and performances of drinking culture. Drinking culture, I argue, not only had a significant role in shaping the Restoration's civic culture of political participation and the emerging early modern public sphere, but also positioned emotions of pleasure and melancholy as social and political objects of care and cultivation. While the politics of pub culture and intoxication have been well documented by historians and literary scholars of early modern England and eighteenth-century America, much of this discussion has not yet been incorporated into political assessments of the public sphere and its history. Reinserting emotion and intoxication into the emergence of the public sphere helps to flesh out the history of feeling and social ritual in civic engagement.

The Politics of Privacy and the Renaissance Public Stage

AbstractThis article examines the politics of privacy and the public drama of the English Renaissance commercial stage. It surveys some recent critical approaches towards the study of privacy and politics including analyses of a supposed early modern public sphere. The article then attends to studies focusing on Renaissance drama and urges that the study of political privacy be extended beyond domesticity. The essay contends that a wider examination of the corpus of public drama in the English Renaissance is necessary. Shakespeare's plays often take centre stage in critical discussions, but complex concepts like privacy and publicity ought to be explored in reference to the diverse range of plays written for the Renaissance theatres. To illustrate the benefits of exploring the wider Renaissance corpus, the article ends by discussing politics and privacy in the neglected tragedy Soliman and Perseda.

Memory, Counternarrative, and the Body Politic in Post–Imjin War Chosŏn Korea

Abstract From the late Chosŏn Dynasty to the present day in both North and South Korea, General Im Kyŏngŏp (1594–1646) has been honored for his loyal service against the Manchus in the early seventeenth century. A close reading of official accounts, literati essays, legal cases, and historical fiction reveals, however, that Im was a deserter and a suspected traitor at the time of his death. Yet by the late eighteenth century, the Chosŏn state had promoted Im, presented him as an ideal subject, and honored his loyalty through state-sanctioned commemoration. Today, the memory of Im remains largely positive; twenty-first century Koreans predominantly know him as a Chosŏn hero or as the object of shamanic supplication. This article suggests that Im’s posthumous rehabilitation attests to the growing power of a reading public and the influence of popular culture on political discourse in an early modern public sphere.

Donne's Biathanatos and the Public Sphere's Vexing Freedom

With focus on Donne's Biathanatos, this essay examines relationships between self-killing, the public sphere, and personal freedom in the seventeenth century and in the present. Specifically, the essay explores how debates about the ethics of self-killing—and about whether publics are competent to decide those ethics—open onto debates about the kind of freedom that public life is thought to confer. Numerous scholars describe the histories of self-killing and of the early modern public sphere with emphasis on enabling, empowering escapes from authoritarian overdetermination. This essay, by contrast, argues that Biathanatos defends a freedom—both to debate suicide publicly and to decide about suicide privately—that is vexing, not enabling, and that induces a hobbling, yet salutary epistemological humility.

Babak Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641ce, Iran Studies (New York: E. J. Brill, 2011). Pp. 404. $177.00 cloth.

Babak Rahimi, Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran: Studies on Safavid Muharram Rituals, 1590–1641ce, Iran Studies (New York: E. J. Brill, 2011). Pp. 404. $177.00 cloth. - Volume 45 Issue 2

Shakespeare's &lt;i&gt;Richard II&lt;/i&gt;, "Popularity," and the Early Modern Public Sphere

Recent discussions of the early modern sphere have excluded the theater as a space where substantive political thinking occurred, focusing instead on print culture and on how high-ranking elites conjured a public in relation to political controversies. In this article, Doty argues that in Richard II , Shakespeare draws attention to how the commons see, judge, and participate, both cognitively and emotionally, in political life. Shakespeare raises these issues by transforming Bolingbroke into a figure of popularity. By the mid-1590s, popularity was a controversial concept, signifying the cultivation of popular favor. It was also the term that elites used to talk about opinion and fears about a that, on the one hand, wanted to feel an intimacy with members of the ruling class, and on the other, wanted to evaluate, discuss, and read about political controversies. By exploring the contemporary phenomenon of popularity, Shakespeare invites his audience to explicate how they are positioned by elites through emotional appeals and arguments about matters of state. In undertaking this act of explication—in which playgoers are invited to judge first Richard, Bolingbroke, and finally the commons—Shakespeare transforms the theater into a space in which playgoers could practice thinking about how power works in the political domain. Therefore, Richard II not only dramatizes the new phenomenon of popularity, but in its creation of a space in which private people explicated political content, enacts a type of popularity—or, in our critical terminology, a sphere.

Nationalism, the Black Legend, and the RevisedSpanish Tragedy

The repeated revival, adaptation, and publication of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy mirrors the Spanish fashion characteristic of the English Renaissance, even as the play's multiple versions embody the Anglo‐Hispanic anxieties observable in the theaters as elsewhere in the early modern (or “precursor”) public sphere. The texts that collectively comprise The Spanish Tragedy respond to England's ongoing Spanish troubles by changing the terms of Kyd's argument. Whereas Kyd's “original,” in print by 1592, declines to participate in the outpouring of Hispanophobic sentiment characteristic of the moment in order to discover the “ethos of empire,” later redactions—including the 1602 edition, which features the famous “painter scene” sometimes ascribed to Ben Jonson, and the First Part of Hieronimo, printed in 1605 but probably related to the “Spanish Comedy” mentioned by Philip Henslowe in the early 1590s—shift the focus of the play, emphasizing Spain's ethnic difference. Incorporating the essentializing categories and rhetorical gestures associated with the Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty, Kyd's revisers reframe The Spanish Tragedy as a celebration of English and Portuguese nationhood. (E. G.)