An introduction to the coffee-house: A discursive model

Coffee-houses in seventeenth-century London, from the first that opened there in 1652, were modelled on similar businesses in Ottoman territories. In London they encouraged an open form of public debate, much celebrated in contemporary literary writing and visual representations, and also in models of the public sphere in the twentieth century. The paper examines the representation of these seventeenth-century discussions and debates, discussing how such conversations were considered to be both open and unfettered, and yet also channelled and regulated into particular forms by unstated expectations. Such regulatory mechanisms are reinforced by the coffee-houses notorious exclusion of women from their debates.