Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by David Norbrook

To a certain degree, this imagined international community corresponds to what Habermas describes as the "literary public sphere" that preceded its political equivalent. As its self-description indicates, this respublica litteraria emphasized its public face. But if the term "republic" had a potentially seditious ring, the "literary" qualifier helped to defuse such connotations--without, however, entirely repudiating them. Precisely because it was literary, a world cut off from everyday life, this republic did not threaten the monarchical orders under which so many scholars lived. (9) And yet the ideals of the republic of letters, which privileged universality, independence, and free exchange of ideas and information, did gain a certain coloring from the republican political principles of antiquity. If Habermas's public sphere and his ideal speech situation can be seen as reworkings of the classical forum, still more was this the case with the idealized discursive space of early modern humanists. The ways in which this space interacted with local political structures, however, varied significantly between England, the France of Margaret Cavendish's exile, and the Netherlands.

Cavendish's husband, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, firmly agreed with his friend Thomas Hobbes that humanist studies were a Trojan horse that could lead inexorably to political subversion. For them, the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642 only confirmed fears they already held that an appetite for the critical scrutiny of political and ecclesiastical authority had passed well beyond the academic world and was infecting the unruly masses. "When most were unlettered," reflected Cavendish, "it was a much better world." (10) His wife had her own reasons to accept this analysis. In July 1642, Margaret Lucas's house had been attacked by rioters who were acting in response to urgent calls in the pro-Parliament press to forestall an anticipated royalist plot in which her eldest brother, Sir John Lucas, was allegedly involved. Then or at a later date, her family tombs were vandalized. These incidents fall in with David Zaret's thesis that the early years of the Civil War marked a major shift toward a political public sphere, with active intervention in public affairs being claimed as a right rather than petitioned for as a grace. (11) Zaret explains this shift in terms of the new technology of print culture; but it is hard to see how technology would have sufficed without ideological motivations. John Waiter's study of Colchester in the period indicates that the crisis of 1642 needs to be set in a longer time frame. Sir John Lucas's strong insistence on his own honor was intensified by the fact that his family's social status was relatively recent, and he belonged to a group of socially anxious gentry who feared eclipse by the puritanical town leaders and were discussing restrictions in Parliamentary franchise to hold at bay a wider political public sphere. In 1638, when the queen's mother, Marie de Medici, had arrived on a visit to England that aroused fears of an international pro-Spanish conspiracy, Sir John entertained her at his home. (12) He was appointed to Prince Charles's Privy Chamber in 1638, the year in which the Earl of Newcastle became the prince's guardian. When Margaret Lucas married Newcastle in 1645, as a member of Henrietta Maria's court, the couple would have already shared a common ideological background, as part of a royalist avant-garde deeply anxious about emergent tendencies to sedition and ready to resort to unconstitutional measures to suppress further danger. (13)