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  • Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
  • David Norbrook

The period of the mid-seventeenth century has particular importance for two different kinds of critique of Habermas's narrative of the early modern public sphere. For some scholars, this narrative is empirically flawed because its presentation of the political public sphere as emerging in the last decade of the seventeenth century misses critical developments at the time of the English Revolution.1 Insofar as this is the case, some explanations, if not necessarily excuses, are readily to hand. Habermas's panoptic view of the span from emergent to what then seemed late capitalism was necessarily limited in its source materials. The book first appeared in 1962, when Christopher Hill's massive corpus of studies of the midcentury "bourgeois revolution" was only starting to appear, and Habermas's presentation of Protestantism as a fundamentally inward-looking movement was not informed by an understanding of the Puritans' civic activism.2 And though he was strongly influenced by Hannah Arendt's reworking of classical republican theory as an alternative to a narrowly privatized liberalism, he was writing before the wave of interest in early modern republicanism that has further transformed our understanding of the Revolution.3 His model, if it has any continuing validity, ought to be able to accommodate new empirical data, and arguably can do so. And it is also arguable that the model is in any case valuable precisely as encouraging a move beyond the rather narrow empiricism and localism of some tendencies in current British historiography. As Habermas's own more recent work has indicated, there is a utopian dimension in his historical analysis, and the question of why there was not a public sphere at a given period may in itself throw light on aspects of a culture that are neglected if we take for granted a limited set of conceptual horizons. His model has a heuristic value in offering a framework against which we may interrogate the norms of public discussion at particular historical moments. [End Page 223]

This utopian aspect, however, is open to criticisms from a different direction. A significant body of feminist scholarship has contested precisely whether a public sphere (or ideal speech situation) as described by Habermas ever could be a good idea, whether the concept is freighted with masculinist assumptions.4 And that critique of one form of utopianism has in turn fed back into historical analysis, for which the English Revolution and its aftermath are crucial. Many historians, following on from the pioneering work of Alice Clarke and Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, have seen the seventeenth century as a period of particularly sharp exclusion of women from the worlds of work and civic activity: it was, wrote Stopes, the period of "the long ebb."5 Changed conceptions of the public have figured largely in this counternarrative. It has been argued that a renewed emphasis on republican valorization of the public, and identification of the world of the court with the private and feminized, gave a distinctively masculinist character to the republican theory that became current in the 1640s and 1650s. Hilda L. Smith has accused both seventeenth-century political thought and its later historians of using a falsely universal terminology that implies inclusivity where women are in practice excluded. Carole Pateman has argued that the liberal theory which emerged in the later seventeenth century instituted a "fraternal social contract" that offered a new principle of relegating women to an unrepresented, private sphere.6

These critiques raise important issues; but they are often pitched at a very abstract level and fail to take account of the agency of particular women. As Amanda Vickery has pointed out, such historical narratives have a tendency to be replayed for successive periods from the seventeenth century onward, with each period seen as one where women begin with a public role and end up by being banished into domesticity.7 The evidentiary basis for such claims is often suspect; and they do end up by creating the historical problem of how modern political and other liberties for women could ever have emerged from political cultures whose traditions apparently paralyzed women's...

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