Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus' Pastoral Writing, Vol. 13 Book

A good companion to -- and critique of -- Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . Melton is much more readable and concrete than Habermas, of course, but also pretty intelligent about addressing the latter's weaknesses. In particular, Melton argues that the emergence of a political public sphere actually did not lag behind the emergence of a literary one; that the public sphere was as much noble as it was bourgeois; and that it facilitated reactionary and nationalist as much as liberal politics. Furthermore, Melton includes women in his picture of the eighteenth-century European public.