Introduction

This book is about how concatenations of people, things, and forms of knowledge created “publics” in early modern Europe and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. Our focus is not exactly the publics themselves but rather the phenomenon that we call “making publics”—the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank, or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of public association, cultural producers and consumers in effect challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped to create the political culture of modernity.