Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster
Authors: Smuts Malcolm 
Published: October 2007

Author's Introduction

The articles in this cluster deal with aspects of an enormously rich and complex historical problem: the role of print and other media in political communication in Britain, from the Tudor period through the nineteenth century. They might be employed together in a course covering this large subject; but equally they lend themselves to separate use in other kinds of courses, dealing with problems ranging from conventional political history to the role of literacy in early modern society, the nature of early modern public culture or the rise of more open and ‘democratic’ forms of politics. Rather than trying to tailor this guide to a single course design I have tried to suggest a range of possibilities.

The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

1. Mark Knights, ‘History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift’, History Compass, 3/1 (2005), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl131.

2. Joad Raymond, ‘Seventeenth‐Century Print Culture’, History Compass, 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2005.00131.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl123.

3. Mark Hampton, ‘Newspapers in Victorian Britain’, History Compass, 2/1 (2004), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00101.x. URL http://www.blackwellcompass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bsl101.

4. Jason Peacey, ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth‐Century England’, History Compass, 5/1 (2007), 85–111, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00369.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl369.

5. Alastair Bellany, ‘Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandals, and Early Stuart Politics’, History Compass, 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00439.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl439.

6. Brian Cowan, ‘Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse’, History Compass, 5/4 (2007), DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00440.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl440.

7. Andrew Walkling, ‘Politics and Theatrical Culture in Restoration England’, History Compass, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00453.x. URL http://www.blackwell‐compass.com/subject/history/article_view?article_id=hico_articles_bpl453.

8. Joseph Black, ‘The Marprelate Tracts (1588–89) and the Public Sphere’, History Compass, (forthcoming).

Author Recommends

The relevant secondary literature is enormous but the following are suggested as surveys or preliminary guides to particular topics.

1. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Lawrence Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

A translation of Habermas's deeply controversial but highly influential theoretical study, first published in German in 1965. An extensive literature exists debating Habermas's theories and their usefulness to historical investigations.

2. Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News, Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

A study of how the involvement of high‐ranking courtiers in a murder became the subject of a famous scandal, through the ways in which it was reported and discussed in print and especially manuscript sources.

3. Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

A wide ranging survey of the development of coffeehouses and their role as centres of social interaction and political discussion.

4. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

A masterful survey of relations between oral culture, writing and print.

5. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

An account of the changing ways in which the British elite – politicians, industry moguls and the educated public generally – regarded the press.

6. Anne Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

A thorough study employing an interdisciplinary methodology of the most important printed attack on sectarian heresy during the English Civil War.

7. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006): 270–92.

An attempt to provide a broad conceptual overview for the period between the Reformation and the early eighteenth century.

8. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993; paperback Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

A pioneering study of how scribal publication – the production of multiple manuscript copies – worked in the seventeenth century, especially in disseminating controversial political tracts.

9. Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

A study of the production and dissemination of printed controversial tracts during the Civil War and Interregnum, particularly good on how politicians sought to use the press by recruiting authors to support their positions and subsidizing publications.

10. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

A study of the emergence of the earliest newsbooks – precursors of the newspaper – during the English Civil War.

11. Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

An examination of the emergence and evolution of the pamphlet or short controversial tract from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century.

12. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

A wide ranging study of different forms of cheaply printed materials and their interaction with religious culture.

13. David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

A work by an historical sociologist, arguing for the importance of petitioning campaigns in England in the 1640s in generating wider public participation in politics.

14. Joseph Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

A fully annotated edition of the seven extant Marprelate tracts, the most notorious pamphlets of the Elizabethan period, with an extensive introduction that discusses their authorship, production, distribution, reception and influence at the time and subsequently.

Useful Links

1. The Anglican Library, The Marprelate Tracts 1588–1589

http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/marprelate/index.htm

Online copies of several Marprelate tracts.

2.
 Early Stuart Libels; British Library Collections

http://www.uk.olivesoftware.com/Default/welcome.asp?skin=BL&QS=Skin%3DBL%26enter%3Dtrue

A searchable database of several leading British newspapers for the period beginning 1851.

3.
 Making Publics 1500–1700: Media, Markets & Association in Early Modern Europe

http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca/

The Web site for a major research project on early modern publics.

Sample Syllabus

Honours Seminar – Topics: ‘Tudor and Stuart England’:

Media and Politics in Early Modern Britain

Introduction to the use of early modern source materials such as books, manuscripts, prints and performances. Topics may include literacy and orality; the print revolution; censorship; readers and reading practices; newspapers and journalism; the origins of scientific persuasion and intellectual property rights.

Requirements

Fall: A 7–10‐page paper (12–15 pages for graduate students) worth 15% and a research prospectus (7–10 pages + bibliography and oral presentation), worth 15%, for a combined total of 30%.

Winter: 20–25‐page research paper (30–40 pages for graduate students), worth 60%, by the end of the Winter semester.

Class participation and two oral presentations in the first semester will make up the remaining 10%.

Readings for the first term will be determined individually by each student and there are no required texts. It would be useful to purchase one or both of the following, however, as many of our readings will be derived from:

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 2002).

You may also find it useful to own John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The book is unfortunately out of print at the moment, but many copies can be found used at various bookshops or online. Brewer's book touches on the eighteenth‐century dimension of many of the issues we will discuss and could be read profitably to supplement our discussions throughout the first semester.

Fall Term Course Outline

I. METHODS

Introduction

Oral and Aural Culture

Ritual and Visual Culture

Grub Street: The History of Authorship

Print Culture: The History of Books

Marginalia: The History of Reading

Scribal Publication

First Paper Due: In seminar on 20 October 2004

II. GENRES

Library Research Seminar

Sermons, Prophecy and Print

Public and Private Subjectivity: Letters and Diaries

Theatre and Performance in Early Modern Culture

The New Rhetoric of Science

News Culture and the Public Sphere

Conclusion and Research Paper Prospectus Reports

Research Paper Prospectus Due: In seminar on Wednesday, 1 December 2004

I. METHODS

1. Introduction

For background information, it would be helpful to read R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 2002), chs 1–5.

2. Orality and Literacy

R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Its Growth, Uses and Impact, 1500–1800 (London: 2002), chs 6–10.

Literacy in Historical Perspective

Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in G. Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: 1986), 97–131.

David Cressy, ‘Levels of Illiteracy in England 1530–1730’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977) or Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: 1980), 1–23.

Margaret Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth‐Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, Social History, 4 (1979): 407–35.

Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: 1982), ch. 7.

Jonathan Barry, ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture’, in Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: 1995), in process.

David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: 1990), ch. 1.

Speech in Historical Perspective

Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O‐Factor (Chicago, IL: 1999).

Donald McKenzie, ‘Speech‐Manuscript‐Print’, in D. Oliphant and R. Bradford (eds.), New Directions in Textual Studies (Austin, TX: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center), 87–109.

Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester: 2002).

Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: 2000), chs 1–3.

Adam Fox, ‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: 1996), 89–116.

Adam Fox, ‘Ballads, Libel and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past & Present, 145 (1994): 47–83.

Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993): 1–21.

R. W. Scribner, ‘Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas’, History of European Ideas, 5 (1984): 237–56.

3. Ritual and Visual Culture

Ritual

Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: 1989).

David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: 1989).

R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1495–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 65–93.

Charles Pythian Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450–1550’, Crisis and Order in English Towns (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 57–85.

Mervyn James, ‘Ritual, drama and social body in the late medieval English bown’, article in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 1986), 16–47.

David Starkey, ‘Representation through Intimacy’, in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London: 1997), 42–78.

Visual Culture

Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: 2001).

Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680–1760 (New Haven, CT: 1988).

L. G. Duggan, ‘Was Art Really the “Book of the Illiterate”?’, Word and Image, 5 (1989): 227–51.

David Garrioch, ‘House Names, Shop Signs and Social Organization in Western European Cities, 1500–1900’, Urban History, 21 (1994): 20–48.

Marcia Pointon, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture 1650–1800’, Art History, 20/3 (Sep. 1997): 397–431.

Stana Nenadic, ‘Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth‐Century Scotland’, History, 82/266 (Apr. 1997): 203–22.

Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

Eirwen Nicholson, ‘Consumers and Spectators: The Public of the Political Print in Eighteenth‐Century England’, History, 81/261 (Jan. 1996): 5–21.

Brian Cowan, ‘An Open Elite: Virtuosity and the Peculiarities of English Connoisseurship’, Modern Intellectual History, 1 (2004): 151–83.

David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (London: 1997).

John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination (New York, NY: 1997), chs 5–7.

Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw (New Haven, CT: 2000), 1–73.

Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven, CT: 1993).

4. Grub Street: The History of Authorship

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: 1998), chs 1–2, pp. 1–186.

Stephen Orgel, ‘What is a Text?’ in David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: 1991), 83–87; also in Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare (London: 2002).

More on the History of Authorship

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago, IL: 2000).

Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: 1997).

Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford: 1998).

John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination (New York, NY: 1997), chs 3, 11.

Quentin Skinner, ‘Part II: Quentin Skinner on Interpretation’, articles in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context (Princeton: 1988), 29–132; or his Visions of Politics, Vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: 2002), chs 4–7.

J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: 1964).

Edwin Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study in Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, MA: 1959).

Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: 1993).

Betty A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (Cambridge: 2005).

Copyright and Intellectual Property

Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: 1995).

Joseph Loewenstein, ‘For a History of Literary Property’, English Literary Renaissance, 18/3 (Autumn 1988): 389–412.

Carla Hesse, ‘The Rise of Intellectual Property, 700 B.C.–A.D. 2000: An Idea in the Balance’, Daedalus, 131/2 (Spring 2002): 26–45.

Censorship and Constraints on Writing

Blair Worden, ‘Literature and Political Censorship in Early Modern England’, in A. C. Dale and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Too Mighty to be Free (Zutphen: 1988), 45–62.

Christopher Hill, ‘Censorship and English Literature’, Collected Essays I: Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth‐Century England (Brighton: 1985), 32–71.

Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI: 1984).

François Furet, ‘Book Licensing and Book Production in the Kingdom of France in the Eighteenth Century’, In the Workshop of History (Chicago, IL: 1984).

5. Print Culture: The History of Books

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: 1998), chs 3–5, pp. 187–379.

American Historical Review Forum: Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns, ‘How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’AHR, 107/1 (Feb. 2002): 18–128.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: 2005).

D. F. Mackenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: 1999).

Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA: 1995), 6–42.

Lucien Febvre and Henri‐Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: 1984).

Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge: 1981).

James Raven, ‘Selling Books across Europe, c.1459–1800: An Overview’, Publishing History, 34 (1993): 5–19.

John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), A History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 4, 1557–1695 (Cambridge: 2002).

Henri‐Jean Martin, Roger Chartier and Jean‐Pierre Vivet (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française, Vol. 1, Le livre conquérant, du Moyen Âge au milieu du XVIIe siècle or Vol. 2, Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830 (Paris: 1982–).

6. Marginalia: The History of Reading I

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL, 1998), 380–443.

Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), ch. 4, ‘Popular Appropriation: Readers and Their Books’, 83–97, 110–13.

For an overview, see: Robert Darnton, ‘The History of Reading’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd edn (Cambridge: 2001).

Reading Practices

David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner 1754–1765, entries for 1754–1756, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–76.

Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (Nov. 1990): 30–78.

William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: 1995).

Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2000).

John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination (New York, NY: 1997), ch. 4.

Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: 1993).

H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: 2001).

H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven, CT: 2005).

Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain 1750–1835 (Cambridge: 1999).

Steven Zwicker, ‘Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Refiguring Revolutions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: 1998), 101–15.

Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), chs 8–11; French edition, Histoire de la lecture (1997).

Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 2003).

James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 1996).

7. Scribal Publication

Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth‐Century England (Oxford: 1993), PR438 T42 L68 1993 [By Consultation] Rare Book Division McLennan Bldg, 4th floor.

J. W. Sanders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951): 139–64.

Alastair Bellany, ‘“Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Peter Lake, and Kevin Sharpe (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, CA: 1994); or his ‘A Poem on the Archbishop's Hearse: Puritanism, Libel and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference’, Journal of British Studies, 34/2 (1995): 137–64.

Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: 1995), 277–300.

Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself’, English Historical Review, 111/443 (1996): 856–81.

Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: 2004).

Paul Hammond, ‘Censorship in the Manuscript Transmission of Restoration Poetry’, Essays and Studies, (1993): 39–62.

Harold Love, ‘Scribal Texts and Literary Communities: The Rochester Circle and Osborn b. 105’, Studies in Bibliography, 42 (1989): 219–35.

Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: 1995).

H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts (New Haven, CT: 1996).

Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD: 1999).

Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: 2002).

First Paper Due: In seminar on 20 October: This paper should be in the form of an extended book review. Choose a work or works (one or two books and/or a collection of articles) we have discussed in the seminar up to this point and evaluate the relative merits of its scholarship.

II. GENRES

8. Library Research Seminar

9. Sermons, Providence, Prophecy and the Early Modern Media

Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth‐Century England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: 1992).

Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti‐Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post‐Reformation England (New Haven, CT: 2002), chs 9–11, pp. 335–479.

Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds.), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester: 2000).

Patrick Collinson, Godly People (London: 1983) essays on John Field and ‘godly’ Master Dering.

Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: 1998).

James Caudle, ‘Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760’, Ph.D. Dissertation (Yale University, 1995).

Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: 1991).

Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism, and Murder in Early Seventeenth‐Century England’, in P. Lake and K. Sharpe (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: 1993).

N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Non‐Conformity (Leicester: 1987).

Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge: 2005).

Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, new edn (Oxford: 2001).

10. Public and Private Subjectivity: Letters and Diaries

Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 7, 1666, ed. Robert Latham and Linnet Latham (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1972).

Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, ed. Guy De la Bedoyere (Woodbridge: 1997), 68–75, 188–210, 222–26, 230–7.

Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York, NY: 2002).

Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form 1660–1785 (Chicago, IL: 1996).

Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self‐Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge: 1997).

Elaine McKay, ‘English Diarists: Gender, Geography and Occupation, 1500–1700’, History, 90/298 (Apr. 2005): 191–212.

James Grantham Turner, ‘Pepys and the Private Parts of Monarchy’, in Gerald Maclean (ed.), The Stuart Restoration (Cambridge: 1995).

Mark S. Dawson, ‘Histories and Texts: Refiguring the Diary of Samuel Pepys’, Historical Journal, 43/2 (2000): 407–31.

Ian Archer, ‘Social Networks in Restoration London’, in Alexandra Shepherd and P. J. Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: 2000).

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Pepys's Diary and the New Science (Charlottesville, VA: 1965).

Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and His Circle in the 1630s – A Parliamentary‐Puritan Connexion?’Historical Journal, 29/4 (1986): 771–93.

Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, Historical Journal, 39/1 (Mar. 1996): 33–56.

Virginia Woolf, ‘Rambling Round Evelyn’, The Common Reader (New York, NY: 1925): 113–23.

Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: 1997).

11. Theatre and Performance in Early Modern Culture

Theatre and the Book

Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, NY: 1997).

Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: 2004).

Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: 2000).

David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (Cambridge: 2001).

Julie Stone Peters, Congreve, The Drama and the Printed Word (Stanford, CA: 1990).

Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (Oxford, 2000).

Theatre and Society

Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti‐Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post‐Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002), chs 7, 9–13, pp. 229–80, 335–576.

Peter Roberts, ‘Elizabethan Players and Minstrels and the Legislation of 1572 vs. Retainers and Vagabonds’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds.), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: 1994), 29–55.

Colin McCabe, ‘Abusing Self and Others: Puritan Accounts of the Shakespearean Stage’, Critical Quarterly, 30 (1988): 3–17.

David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (London: 1991).

W. Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY: 1992).

Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare's England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: 2001).

Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, NY: 1985).

Paula Backsheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: 1993).

Harold Love, ‘Who Were the Restoration Audience?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 10 (1980): 21–44.

Jean Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo‐American Thought 1550–1750 (Cambridge: 1986).

John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination (New York, NY: 1997), chs 8–10.

Mark Dawson, Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (Cambridge, 2005).

Theatrical Authorship

Jeffrey Mastan, ‘Playwrighting, Authorship and Collaboration’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, NY: 1997).

Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven, CT: 1995).

Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820 (Berkeley, CA: 1994), ch. one.

Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford: 1998).

12. The Rhetoric of Science

Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, IL: 1998), 444–542.

Browse the early isues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, (1665–1678) online at J‐STOR: http://www.jstor.org/browse/03702316?config=jstor.

Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air‐Pump (Princeton, NJ: 1985).

Michael Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism and the “Ideology” of the Early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered’, in Establishing the New Science (Woodbridge: 1989), 45–72.

Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: 1980).

Peter Dear, ‘Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis, 76 (1985): 145–61.

Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth‐Century England (Chicago, IL: 1994).

Robert Illiffe, ‘“Is He Like Other Men?” The Meaning of the Principia Mathematica, and the Author as Idol’, in Gerald Maclean (ed.), The Stuart Restoration (Cambridge: 1995), 159–76.

Roy Porter, ‘Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England’, British Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, 3 (1980); also in Peter Borsay (ed.), The Eighteenth‐Century Town (London: 1990), 243–67.

James Delbourgo, ‘Electricity, Experiment and Enlightenment in Eighteenth‐Century North America’, Ph.D. Dissertation (Columbia University, 2003).

13. News Culture and the Public Sphere

Read a selection of essays from the Tatler and the Spectator; they are available online: http://harvest.rutgers.edu/projects/spectator/project.html.

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: 1989), pt. 1, 2.

Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: 2005), pt. 2, 3.

Periodical and Occasional Literature

Adrian Johns, ‘Miscellaneous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000): 159–86.

Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: 1989).

Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: 1996).

Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003); DA315 R39 2003 [By Consultation] Rare Book Division McLennan Bldg, 4th floor.

Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: 2004).

Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695–1855 (London: 2000).

Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds.), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: 2002).

News and Political Culture

Brendan Dooley (ed.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: 2001).

Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: 2002).

Steven Pincus, ‘“Coffee Does Politicians Create”: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995): 807–34.

14. Conclusion and Work in Progress Reports

This seminar will be devoted to oral presentations of your work thus far on your research paper. Along with your oral report, you should submit a version of your research prospectus. Your prospectus should include a short description (7–10 pages) of your research topic, why you think it is an important one, and how you intend to go about researching it in the Winter term. This prospectus should be accompanied by an annotated bibliography of around 50 sources, both primary and secondary. Your annotations should briefly indicate the ways in which the work cited might be helpful to your research.

Winter Term

We will meet as a workshop to discuss the problems and potential of your research and to share drafts of your work in progress. For assistance in thinking about how to go about your research and writing it up, I would recommend the following guides:

Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb and Joseph Williams, The Craft of Research (Chicago, IL: 1995).

Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Serious Nonfiction – And Get It Published (New York, NY: 2002).

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 3rd edn (New York, NY: 1979).

1. [4–7 Jan.] After Humanism: Historical Scholarship and Society

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: 1997).

2. [10–14 Jan.] Thinking Historically

[12 Jan.]: Submit a Revised Version of Your Fall Term Prospectus:

In the next two weeks we will consider some of the problems and promises involved in researching and writing historically. We will use Jordanova's text as a guide to these issues, but try to relate your reading of his book to your own research in progress.

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), chs 1–3

3. [17–21 Jan.] Writing Historically

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000), chs 4–7 and postscript

4. [24–28 Jan.] Presentations

From this week on, we will meet to discuss one research paper project in detail. Each person member of the seminar will be responsible for preparing a discussion centred around her/his research in progress. You may ask the other members of the seminar to read a short primary source or an article (be sure to consult with Prof. Cowan first, to ensure that the material can be made accessible to everyone) or you may simply choose to pose questions to the group related to issues you are dealing with in your own research in progress.

The presentation schedule will be assigned randomly by Prof. Cowan or you may volunteer for a particular date. If there is a compelling reason why you cannot present on a certain date, it may be possible to change dates with someone else, but only if that person also agrees.

Don't expect to have all the answers to your research at hand by this stage: think of your presentation as an opportunity to get detailed feedback from the rest of the seminar as to how to go about solving interpretative and/or practical problems you have encountered so far.

Do expect to speak for about 15–30 minutes at the beginning of the session to introduce your topic to the group. You should be able to answer these questions:

What is the historical problem your paper seeks to address and solve?

What sources will you use to answer your historical problem?

What is the existing historical literature (the historiography) that exists on this problem or topic? If there isn't any, then explain why not. If there is a lot, explain how your approach may relate to the existing historiography. Do you agree with it, or do you intend to challenge it?

Presentation #1

5. [31 Jan.–4 Feb.]

Presentation #2

6. [7–11 Feb.]

Presentation #3

7. [14–18 Feb.]

Presentation #4

8. Study Week: No Classes [21–25 Feb.]

9. [28 Feb.–4 Mar.]

[2 March]: First Drafts Due in class for discussion and submission. Everyone must submit a rough draft of the research paper. It should be written in complete sentences but it need not be fully referenced or footnoted, although you will save yourself a lot of trouble later in the term if you do include your references now.

The seminar will be devoted to discussing your research papers. We will pair up and share drafts with each other: you should give a copy of your paper to your partner by Sunday, 28 February in order to allow her/him to read it, think about it and be prepared to comment upon it by the time we meet as a group. Bring your rough drafts to the seminar and be prepared to present your thoughts and conclusions on your partner's paper to the rest of the class. Your presentation should be about ten minutes.

10. [7–11 Mar.]

Presentation #5

11. [14–18 Mar.]

Presentation #6

12. [21–25 Mar.]

Presentation #7

13. [28 Mar. – 1 Apr.]

Presentation #8

14. [4–8 Apr.]

15. [6 April]: Second Drafts Due in class for discussion and submission. At this point, you should have a paper draft that is close to complete. You should bring this paper into class for discussion by the group. Prof. Cowan will look over the paper and provide last minute suggestions for improvement before you submit your final draft in the following week.

16. [11–13 Apr.]

Submission of Papers and Group Discussion of Research Accomplished

Friday: End of Term

Focus Questions

The Compass cluster articles deal both with a general historical problem – how did print and other media shape the growth of political communication between the sixteenth‐ and eighteenth‐century – and with Jurgen Habermas's more specific theoretical model of an emergent ‘public sphere’. A few of the authors ignore Habermas and those who do deal with him invariably criticize or disagree with details of his argument. Several contributors nevertheless regard his model as stimulating and valuable. Depending on the purposes of a course, Habermasian theories can either be pushed to the side or presented as a central theoretical problem.

In the first case the following questions might prove fruitful:

1. To what extent was free public debate enhanced by the emergence of cheap newsbooks in the seventeenth century and later expansions of newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

2. To what degree and in what ways was the political press constrained by political and commercial pressures in the early modern period? Did these pressures grow or diminish over time? Was the press significantly more independent by the early nineteenth century than it had been two hundred years earlier? Was it ever truly depoliticized?

3. How did different sections of the public respond to the print revolution and how did they exploit it for their own ends?

4. What significance should we assign to non‐print media – ranging from manuscripts to plays and coffee house conversations – in the development of a more sophisticated political culture? How should we understand relationships between print and other media?

Courses with a more theoretical orientation might consider additional questions:

1. How and why can flawed theoretical models, like that of Habermas, provide a useful starting point for fruitful historical research? At what point do those models cease to be useful? Is Habermas still worth engaging?

2. What hidden assumptions are concealed within familiar and seemingly neutral terms, like the concept of the public? What are the implications for historical research if we follow Mark Knights in treating the eighteenth century public as a fiction, constructed and redefined through print and other media, rather than an objective feature of the political world? Can his argument be adapted to fit other, earlier and later periods, including our own? If so what are the implications for our understanding of elections, representative institutions and other organized ways of expressing public opinion? Alternatively, might it be more useful to follow a Canadian research project now underway, by substituting the plural form, publics, for the singular concept of the public? In other words, should we think in terms of a single coherent ‘public sphere’ or a variety of more limited publics that overlap and interact in complex ways?

3. Similarly how should we define the concept of political communication? What are the implications of Alastair Bellany's argument that we should consider libellous accusations of personal vice and poetic metaphors of bodily deformity as forms of political discourse? Do we need to redefine the meaning of politics for each period of history we study, to reflect changing conventions and assumptions?

4. All the articles in this cluster deal with particular sites where controversial political materials were either manufactured or consumed, such as print shops and coffee houses, as well as social and economic practices that shaped how political communication worked, like the patronage relationships connecting politicians to Grub Street writers, or the networks through which manuscript libels were transmitted. How does a recovery of the social, economic and material conditions determining the production and consumption of controversy reshape our understanding of political thought and culture?

5. Can computer technology, with its ability to combine text, visual images and sound, help us achieve a more holistic impression of how political communication may have worked in the past, by integrating print sources with other forms of visual, manuscript and oral/aural communication, including music? How does the medium through which scholarship is conveyed shape our perceptions of the historical forms of communication we study?

Seminar/Project Idea

See Sample Syllabus 4. [24–28 Jan.] Presentations.

Acknowledgement

Malcolm Smuts and the editorial team at History Compass would like to thank all the cluster authors for contributing to this cluster Teaching and Learning Guide. A particular mention goes to Brian Cowan (McGill University) for supplying us with a complete sample syllabus and seminar project/idea.