T “public sphere” has become ubiquitous in the historiography and in historically oriented literary criticism of early modern England. In this article, we argue that the phrase does have real efficacy in discussions of early modern England. However, we want to use “public sphere” in slightly different ways than most scholars have done. In particular, we argue that a narrative of the emergence of the public sphere, in the ways we will define it, can be used to talk coherently about the entire period from the Reformation into the eighteenth century. The “public sphere” has been moving backward in time. The term “bourgeois public sphere” originally referred to a particular kind of Enlightenment discussion. However, “public sphere” now appears frequently in articles and monographs referring to the Restoration, the Interregnum, the Civil War, and it is even invading the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.

/pdf/rethinking-the-public-sphere-in-early-modern-england-1umchysiwr.pdf

Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England

Why did people choose the Reformation? What was it in the evangelical teaching that excited, moved or persuaded them? Andrew Pettegree here tackles these questions directly by re-examining the reasons that moved millions to this decisive and traumatic break with a shared Christian past. He charts the separation from family, friends, and workmates that adherence to the new faith often entailed and the new solidarities that emerged in their place. He explores the different media of conversion through which the Reformation message was communicated and imbibed - the role of drama, sermons, song and the book - and argues that the potency of print can only be understood as working in harmony with more traditional modes of communication. His findings offer a persuasive new answer to the critical question of how the Reformation could succeed as a mass movement in an age before mass literacy.

/pdf/reformation-and-the-culture-of-persuasion-33pekziz5r.pdf

Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion

In 1620 Thomas Scott published a notorious pamphlet entitled Vox Populi. This purported to recount the proceedings of the Spanish council of state and denounced the devious machinations of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and by implication the pro-Spanish policy of King James. Once Scott's authorship became known he took the traditional way out and fled to the Low Countries. There he served as a preacher with the English regiments and as a minister at Utrecht. He also continued his pamphlet commentary on events in England. Scott, then, was that well-known figure, the radical puritan opponent of the Jacobean regime. He has certainly been cast in that role and until recently such a view of his career would have seemed unexceptionable enough. However, of late there has emerged a corpus of work which might be thought to render any such view of Scott untenable. On the one hand, the existence within the mainstream of English protestantism of anything approaching a coherent body of puritan attitudes has been challenged, at least until the emergence of Arminianism polarized religious opinion and almost created a self-conscious and aggressive puritanism where there had been none before. In the political sphere it has been claimed that within the predominant view of constitutional and political propriety any attempt at concerted opposition to royal policy was both conceptually and practically impossible.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0018246X00021233

Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match*

In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone provides the first systematic account of the production, circulation and reception of these manuscript pamphlets. By placing them in the context of social change, state formation, and the emergence of 'politic' expertise, Millstone uses the pamphlets to resolve one of the central problems of early Stuart history: how and why did the men and women of early seventeenth-century England come to see their world as political?

Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England

One hundred years ago the most scholarly of the whig historians, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, gave the Petition of Right a leading place in his interpretation of early Stuart England, as the beginning of a constitutional revolution in which parliament took sovereignty from an autocratic Stuart monarchy. To Gardiner this was part of a movement, his portrayal of which was coloured by ideas of patriotism and moral good, and which had the sanction of historical inevitability. Clearly there were serious flaws built into Gardiner's view: teleology, narrowness of theme, implausible simplicity, belief in inevitable progress, and the selective attribution of unconscious motives to men such as Sir John Eliot. Recent historiography has demonstrated the inherent weaknesses of the traditional liberal-whig and indeed the Marxist views of this period. A most stimulating revisionist argument and a whole industry of scholarship seem likely to reduce Gardiner's work to a great narrative, graced frequently with sane judgement, but in conceptual terms virtually abolished. Nevertheless the Petition of Right remains a salient and significant feature of the early Stuart landscape. Conrad Russell has established clearly that the making of the Petition was important as the culmination of a national war crisis and as an ideological watershed. Indicative of an emerging fear of subversion – of the alteration of government and religion together – it anticipated the attitudes of those in the Long Parliament who came to oppose the Caroline regime. The Petition needs to be given due attention in seeking to understand the important relationship between the political events of the 1620s and those of the 1640s.

The Legal Status of the Petition of Right

The English Commonwealth, 1547-1640

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The English Commonwealth, 1547-1640