Making Space Public in Early Modern Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy(Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Rethinking Habermas: Performative Publics 1. English Coffeehouses and French Salons: Rethinking Habermas, Gender and Sociability in Early Modern French and British Historiography Brian Cowan 2. What’s Hamlet to Habermas? Theatrical Publics and the Elizabethan Stage Steven Mullaney 3. Viewing the Paper Stage: Civil War, Print, Theatre and the Public Sphere Rachel Willie 4. Legal Space and Theatrical Publics Kelly Stage 5. Place, Space, and Public Formation in the Drama of the Spanish Empire Margaret R. Greer Part II: Spaces Between: Transforming Journeys and Geographies 6. Assembling the Archipelago: Early Modern Isolarii and the Journey to Constantinople Bronwen Wilson 7. "Now through you made public for everyone": Narrative, Mobility, and Nation-Building in the Peutinger Map and John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675) Meredith Donaldson Clark 8. Publicity, Representation, and the Vision of French Nationhood in Seventeenth-century Rome Elena Napolitano 9. Bridging Space and Publics: The Senses and the Social in early modern Venice Marlene Eberhart 10. Town and Country: The Geography of the English Literary Public Kevin Pask Part III: The Potential of the Private 11. Negotiating the ‘forum politicum’ and the ‘forum conscientiae’: John Calvin and the Religious Origins of the Modern Public Sphere Torrance Kirby 12. Painting the Visible Church Angela Vanhaelen 13. Matrices of Force: The Social Cartography of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World Meredith Evans 14. Shakespeare and the Spaces of Publicity Paul Yachnin Afterword Darin Barney

About the Author :
Angela Vanhaelen is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Communicataion Studies at McGill University, Canada. Joseph Ward is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, US.