Including contributions from key early modern historians, this book uses and critiques the notion of the public sphere to produce a new account of England in the post-reformation period from the 1530s to the early eighteenth century. Makes a substantive contribution to the historiography of early modern England.

Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University|Steven Pincus is Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University

List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus
1. The pilgrimage of grace and the public sphere. Ethan Shagan
2. The politics of popularity and the public sphere: the 'monarchical republic' of Elizabeth I defends itself. Peter Lake
3. The smiling crocodile: the Earl of Essex and late-Elizabethan 'popularity'. Paul Hammer
4. The 'public man' in late Tudor and early Stuart England. Richard Cust
5. The embarrassment of libels: perceptions and representations of verse libeling in early Stuart England. Alastair Bellany
6. Marketing a massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the public sphere in early modern England. Anthony Milton
7. Men, the 'public' and the 'private' in the English revolution. Ann Hughes
8. The state and civil society in early modern England: capitalism, causation and Habermas' bourgeois public sphere. Steven Pincus
9. Matthew Smith v the 'great men': plot-talk, the public spere and the problem of credibility in the 1690s. Rachel Weil
10. How rational was the later Stuart public sphere? Mark Knights
Index