Making Publics in Early Modern Europe People, Things, Forms of Knowledge [Paperback]

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.

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction, Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin Part I: People1. Religion Inside Out: Dutch House Churches and the Making of Publics in the Dutch Republic, Steven Mullaney, Angela Vanhaelen, Joe Ward 2. Emerging Publics of Religious Reform in the 1530s: The Affair of the Placards and the Publication of Antoine de Marcourts Livre des marchans, Torrance Kirby 3. Academies, Circles, Salons and the Emergence of the Pre-Modern Literary Public Sphere in Sixteenth-Century France, Fran?ois Rouget 4. Pietro Aretino, Thomas Nashe, and Early Modern Rhetorics of Public Address, Wes Folkerth Part II: Things5. Hamlet and the Social Thing in Early Modern England, Paul Yachnin 6. Petruccis Publics for the First Motet Prints, Julie E. Cummingls.