Catholic Polemic and the Limits of Consensus in Post-Reformation England

• In Event: The Early Modern Public Sphere Revisited: Consensus Politics as Usual?

Abstract

Political theorists have responded critically to historians and literary scholars invoking the term “public sphere” merely to describe historical patterns of information flow. For the theorists who invented and defined the term, “public sphere” indeed refers to an imaginary space in which mutually comprehensible arguments can be exchanged, but for them this exchange of arguments is by definition for the purpose of building consensus around matters of common concern. This paper offers a survey of the central role consensus plays in contemporary public sphere theory in order to reexamine the public-sphere-like phenomena existing scholarship has identified in early modern religious polemics. A series of Catholic writers I examine despaired of any possibility of persuading England’s Protestant majority. The perception of contemporaries that consensus was impossible suggests that the project of the post-Reformation public sphere was fragile at best and that participants were aware of its limits.

Author

• Victor Lenthe, University of Wisconsin–Madison