Popular Opinion in the Middle Ages by Charles W. Connell

Author:Charles W. Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 2016-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Physical Public Space as Medieval Public Sphere

For the past quarter century the study of the public has been offered new stimulation by the English translation of the work of Jürgen Habermas, who offered scholars an understanding of public dialogue and rational opinion formation which he labeled Öffentlichkeit, a term that has been translated in English, incorrectly some have argued, as the “public sphere.”931 Although he placed its origins in the Enlightenment, many scholars since then have tried to push it back in historical time. Habermas began by asking whether rational arguments among companies of men could reach a consensus to form a persuasive basic for political action. His “company of men” was elitist in nature and on this basis the argument was immediately challenged widely. Habermas clearly struck a nerve, and the energy generated by the shock has not gone away, as witness several redefinitions of the public sphere by scholars from many perspectives.932 A number of medievalists for that matter see its first arising in the debates of the Investiture Contest, the market places of England, and the theatres of Arras, as we discuss further below in this chapter.

One of the most thoughtful reviews of the impact of Habermas was put forth by Harold Mah in 2000 who argues that historians have “spatialized” the public sphere by “conceiving of it as a space or domain of free expression and argument that is accessible to any social group,” which has led to a wrongful interpretation of Habermas and neglected much that could be more usefully applied.933 Mah questions the translation of Öffentlichkeit as a “space” that one can enter and leave. He argues that social and cultural historians have selected this connotation because they study dissenting groups. Like Edward Thompson in his classic The Making of the English Working Class, they want to demonstrate agency for marginal groups. By conceiving of the public space as a medium for dialogue among dissenting groups, it becomes a place that “crystallizes the process by which a distinct social group comes to define itself as a group.”934

Relative to the Middle Ages, Mah points out that Habermas did conceive of a premodern form of public expression which he rather vaguely called “representative publicness.” He went on to explain this did not mean representative government, but rather it was “the presentation of self to others in such a way that what one was presenting was one’s social status and corporate membership,” which, for example, could be interpreted as the medieval elite presenting themselves to the common people in various public displays as “a means of making a privileged social particularity.”935 However, Habermas did not allow for the term to mean a public expression of beliefs in the medieval world, such as the case of the Cathars who it might be argued asserted a representative publicness and a form of public identity that was deemed necessary for them to be declared heretics. Nor would Mah allow such an interpretation, because if a social group came into the

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