Pamphleteering and the Nascent Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century England

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The purpose of this research is to consider the relationship between seventeenth-century pamphlet culture and the development of the nascent public sphere, while exploring the ways in which various representations of the tumult in the mid-century were recalled and appropriated.In the course of the seventeenth-century, quite a number of pamphlets and newsbooks were published, conveying political and religious information. The proliferation of cheap written media and the ideological act of reproduction and interpretation combined to open up a popular sphere of political debate. Once this space for dispute had been established, it became available to a wide spectrum of the public. This sphere of public debate was characterized by its hybridity. These printed newsbooks were still sitting at the borders of oral, scribal and print cultures. For example, in the pamphlets and newsbooks, the Irish were often regarded as rebellious papists and uncivilized barbarians ; after the Irish rebellion of 1641, rumors of genocide of the English people spread all over England, grounded in fears of popery and popish invasion of England. The Irish Catholics were widely regarded as barbarous enemies of Protestantism. In seventeenth-century England, in fact, the development of news industry had been closely interwoven with anxieties about the Catholic counter-reformation and Popish conspiracies aimed at overthrowing English Protestantism. To take another example, numerous satiric pseudo-journalistic pamphlets have been published in 1660, ridiculing the English republic or the Rump parliament. These pamphlets rest upon the common basis of Restoration polemic that characterized republicanism as seditious and chaotic. Even though the emergent sphere of debate and discussion tended to lack a rational factor from the Habermasian perspective, pamphlet publishing eventually stimulated the emergence of a realm of critical public debate.