Making Space Public In Early Modern Europe

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.

In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia.

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.

Scholars have associated Calvinism with print and literary cultures, with republican, liberal, and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Reflecting on these arguments, the essays in this volume recognize that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition but varied across space and time. The authors demonstrate that multiple iterations of Calvinism developed and impacted upon differing European communities that were experiencing social and cultural transition. They show how these different forms of Calvinism were shaped by their adherents and opponents, and by the divergent political and social contexts in which they were articulated and performed. Recognizing that Reformed Protestantism developed in a variety of cultural settings, this volume analyzes the ways in which it related to the multi-confessional cultural environment that prevailed in Europe after the Reformation.

This groundbreaking collection explores the convergence of the spatial and digital turns through a suite of smartphone apps (Hidden Cities) that present research-led itineraries in early modern cities as public history. The Hidden Cities apps have expanded from an initial case example of Renaissance Florence to a further five historic European cities. This collection considers how the medium structures new methodologies for site-based historical research, while also providing a platform for public history experiences that go beyond typical heritage priorities. It also presents guidelines for user experience design that reconciles the interests of researchers and end users. A central section of the volume presents the underpinning original scholarship that shapes the locative app trails, illustrating how historical research can be translated into public-facing work. The final section examines how history, delivered in the format of geolocated apps, offers new opportunities for collaboration and innovation: from the creation of museums without walls, connecting objects in collections to their original settings, to informing decision-making in city tourism management. Hidden Cities is a valuable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars across a variety of disciplines including urban history, public history, museum studies, art and architecture, and digital humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

At the start of the seventeenth century a distinction emerged between 'public', outdoor, amphitheatre playhouses and 'private', indoor, hall venues. This book is the first sustained attempt to ask: why? Theatre historians have long acknowledged these terms, but have failed to attest to their variety and complexity. Assessing a range of evidence, from the start of the Elizabethan period to the beginning of the Restoration, the book overturns received scholarly wisdom to reach new insights into the politics of theatre culture and playbook publication. Standard accounts of the 'public' and 'private' theatres have either ignored the terms, or offered insubstantial explanations for their use. This book opens up the rich range of meanings made available by these vitally important terms and offers a fresh perspective on the way dramatists, theatre owners, booksellers, and legislators, conceived the playhouses of Renaissance London.

The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.