Introduction

Research into public debate does not loom large in medieval studies. In fact, the term ‘public debate’ is often seen as an anachronistic imposition of a phenomenon only emerging in the early modern period. From one side, this reluctance to deal with public debate – and the related concepts of ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’ – is not difficult to understand, since the work that established the point of departure for public sphere studies to a large extent neglected the Middle Ages. The work in question is Jürgen Habermas' Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, originally published in 1962. According to Habermas, the medieval public sphere – or the ‘representative public sphere’ as he calls it – was politically dysfunctional because it did not constitute an arena for discussion and argument, but rather represented a forum in which courtly society could display its power. Consequently, it was not debate and the ‘force of the argument’ that set the premise for the medieval ‘representative public sphere’, but symbolic communication in the form of rituals, gestures and rhetoric.

Now, this is obviously neither the time nor the place for dealing in detail with Habermas' theoretical construction of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. However, because it is the basis for recent scholarship on public debate as well as one main reason for the neglect of medieval scholars in looking for medieval variants of public debate, some further aspects of the Strukturwandel need to be addressed.