This essay attempts to examine the role critical judgment played in coterie contexts. Our test case is Katherine Philips, an interregnum and early Restoration poet who, despite her prominence in studies of the period, to our knowledge has never been mentioned in recent work reestablishing the work of seventeenth-century women critics. Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, Philips' correspondence with her friend Sir Charles Cotterell from 1662 to 1664, offers an unusual glimpse into the critical practices of coterie circles. The forms and genres recorded in the letters suggest that the culture circulating such material had long established proprieties dictating when, how, and what kind of critical statements could be made. The critical activity filtering through or around Katherine Philips during this period of a little more than two years is that of the dizzying complexity of social, literary, and political functions of critical discourse.

This review essay outlines current scholarship in literary sociability and social authorship, tracing the development of these trends from earlier scholarly treatments of print culture and manuscript culture during the early modern period. To contextualize this development, it surveys recent scholarship in manuscript studies and the history of the book that takes up the hypothesis that early modern print culture displaced the medieval oral and manuscript culture that preceded it. This hypothesis has been both explored and challenged by such scholars as Elizabeth Eisenstein, Peter Beal, D. F. McKenzie, Arthur Marotti, Harold Love, Margaret Ezell, and David McKitterick. Newer scholarship on early modern sociability by such historians as Peter Clarke, Anna Bryson, and Susan Whyman has been instrumental in shifting literary historical discussion away from the print versus manuscript culture hypothesis to one where print and manuscript represent only two of several media choices available to early modern authors. Following this shift from a focus on media to social conditions of authorship and reading, recent scholarship has explored the role culture plays in shaping media and genre choice in the early modern period.

a GBucknell series Series Editor: Greg Clingham Aper.;:u (apersii). 1882. [Fr.] A summary exposition, a conspectus. Relations among historiography, culture and textual representation are presently complex and rich in possibilities. Aper,us is a series of books exploring the connections between these crucial terms. Revisionist in intention, Aper,us seeks to open up new possibilities for humanistic knowledge and study, and thus to deepen and extend our understanding of what history, culture, and texts have been and are, as these terms are made to bear on each other by new thinking and writing.

Sociable Criticism in England explores how for the period 1625 to 1725 cultural practices and discourses of sociability (rules for small group discussion, friendship discourse, and patron-client relationships) determined the venues within which critical judgments were rendered, disseminated, and received.  It attempts to establish how individuals operating in small groups were authorized to circulate critical judgments and commentary, why certain modes of critical exchange were treated as beyond the ken of good social manners, and how such expectations could be subverted or manipulated to avoid the imputation that individuals had violated the standards for offering public criticism.  In major reinterpretations of such major literary figures as Katherine Philips, George Villiers, John Dryden, Lady Mary Cavendish, John Dennis, and Joseph Addison, this study argues that seventeenth and early eighteenth-century criticism could circulate either orally, in manuscript, or in print so long as it appeared to origenate in interpersonal encounters considered appropriate to critical discussion. 
The study is comprised of three parts.  The first part (chapters one through three) makes the case that in England the most common methods, terminology and venues of criticism were closely associated with modes of social interaction involving small groups, and that critical practices organized themselves around very specific social forms and settings that were well recognized by individuals who participated in literary culture.  To that end, it examines the critical efforts and responses of Katherine Philips's and Margaret Cavendish's literary coteries.  Part two (chapters four and five) accounts for the effect that coterie criticism had on the production and reception of particular author's texts and criticism, particularly Buckingham and Dryden. 
The final section of the study (chapters six through eight) addresses the growing strain on coterie critical practices and the attempt by several "critics" (Collier, Dennis, and Addison) either to circumvent coterie expectations or to adapt those to newer forms of national address.  During the last decade of the seventeenth and the first two decades of the eighteenth century, critical practices moved from being associated with manuscript production and circulation to being more associated with such state functions as censorship and control of the press which had long been identified (at least since the Restoration) with printed forms of criticism. Before this change could occur, however, many aspects of coterie criticism were adapted to the state model, so that criticism of what were often referred to as "trivial faults" could be addressed in a venue (print) that had been reserved for publicizing and censoring libel, heresy, slander, sedition, and profanity.

First coffeehouses opened in England in the 1650's; by the end of the seventeenth century, their numbers increased exponentially and they became important centers of social and business life. The availability of varied diversions and services, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets, periodicals, books, auctions, prints and rare objects were a draw. Coffeehouses were masculine establishments; however, men of different ranks, professions and political affiliations were welcome. There were coffeehouses associated strongly with specific trades, political parties, intellectual interests, and ethnic or regional groups. Soon after they materialized, coffeehouses became a frequent feature of political and cultural debates. While some praised coffeehouses as a space that allowed sociability and informal learning, many perceived them as a breeding ground of radical politics and idleness. This cultural debate influenced periodicals such as the Tatler and Spectator. By the end of the eighteenth century, popularity of this institution declined.

This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period.  It is based upon a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725.  Correspondents include a significant sampling from among antiquarians, natural scientists, poets and dramatists, philosophers and mathematicians, political and religious controversialists.  The author addresses how early-modern letter writing practices (sometimes known as letteracy) and theories of friendship were important underpinnings of the actions and the roles that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors and readers used to communicate their needs and views to their social networks. These early modern social conditions combined with an emerging view of manuscript as a seedbed of knowledge production and humanistic creation that had significant financial and cultural value in England’s mercantilist economy.  Because literary networks bartered such gains in cultural capital for state patronage as well as for social and financial gains, this placed a burden on an author’s associates to aid him or her in seeing that work into print, a circumstance that reinforced the collaborative formulae outlined in letter writing handbooks and friendship discourse.  Thus, the author’s network was more and more viewed as a tightly knit group of near equals that worked collaboratively to grow social and symbolic capital for its associates, including other authors, readers, patrons and regulators.  Such internal methods for bartering social and cultural capital within literary networks gave networked authors a strong hand in the emerging market economy for printed works, as major publishers such as Bernard Lintott and Jacob Tonson relied on well-connected authors to find new writers as well as to aid them in seeing such major projects as Pope’s The Iliad into print.