Consultation and co-creation with the wider public, through a monthly reading group and practical application of the findings in two public exhibitions, will be crucial in gauging how audiences engage with political texts today; the role that genre, literary devices, and the physical form of the text play in that process; and how texts can be presented in ways that reflect the intentions of their authors while also speaking effectively to modern readers. This engagement will ensure that the relevance of these findings for twenty-first- century society can be addressed, both in thinking about the relative advantages of print versus digital editions, and in using historical resources to develop strategies for fostering active citizenship today.
Infographic produced by Laura of Nifty Fox Creative reflecting our discussion on Tuesday 7th February 2023. Having taken part in the discussion, John from the reading group read a letter by Jonathan Sawday of Saint Louis University in the London Review of Books for 16th February 2023, which prompted him to think further about the nature of ‘publication’ and how this relates to the Coffee House. Sawday, referring to Katherine Rundell’s recent book on the poet John Donne, noted that manuscript circulation would have been understood in the seventeenth century as a form of publication and that even Donne’s sermons might be viewed in this way. John reflected that in this sense Coffee Houses – and theatres – might be seen as places of ‘publication’ too. This suggests an enlarging of the public sphere of debate, but John wondered to what extent this was an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon.
Experiencing Political Texts 