<P> The English coffeehouse also acted as a primary centre of communication for news . Historians strongly associate English coffeehouses with print and scribal publications, as they were important venues for the reading and distribution of such materials, as well as the gathering of important news information . Most coffeehouses provided pamphlets and newspapers, as the price of admission covered their costs . Patrons perused reading material at their leisure . Coffeehouses became increasingly associated with news culture, as news became available in a variety of forms throughout coffeehouses . These forms include: "Print, both licensed and unlicensed; manuscripts; aloud, as gossip, hearsay, and word of mouth ." Runners also went round to different coffeehouses * reporting the latest current events * . Circulation of bulletins announcing sales, sailings, and auctions was also common in English coffeehouses . </P> <P> Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's news publications, The Spectator and the Tatler, were considered the most influential venue of print news that circulated in English coffeehouses . These journals were likely the most widely distributed sources of news and gossip within coffeehouses throughout the early half of the 18th century . Addison and Steele explicitly worked to reform the manners and morals of English society, accomplished through a veiled anecdotal critique of English society . As these anecdotal stories held underlying, rather than explicit, social critiques, "readers were persuaded, not coerced, into freely electing these standards of taste and behaviour as their own ." Addison and Steele relied on coffeehouses for their source of news and gossip as well as their clientele, and then spread their news culture back into the coffeehouses as they relied on coffeehouses for their distribution . According to Bramah, the good standing of the press during the days in which Addison and Steele distributed The Tatler and The Spectator in English coffeehouses can be directly attributed to the popularity of the coffeehouse . </P> <P> There is contention among historians as to the extent to which English coffeehouses contributed to the public sphere of the age of Enlightenment . There is no simple and uniform way to describe the Age of Enlightenment; however, historians generally agree that during this period, reason became a substitute for other forms of authority that had previously governed human action, such as religion, superstition, or customs of arbitrary authority . In his analysis of the Enlightenment, Jürgen Habermas argues that the age of Enlightenment had seen the creation of a bourgeois public sphere for the discussion and transformations of opinions . According to Habermas, this' public realm' "is a space where men could escape from their roles as subjects, and gain autonomy in the exercise and exchange of their own opinions and ideas ." Consequently, there is also no simple and uniform' public sphere', as it can encompass different spheres within, such as an intellectual of political public sphere of the age of Enlightenment . </P> <P> In regard to English coffeehouses, there is contention among historians as to the extent to which coffeehouses should be considered within the public sphere of the Enlightenment . Dorinda Outram places English coffeehouses within an intellectual public sphere, focusing on the transfusion of enlightened ideas . She justifies her placement of English coffeehouses within an' intellectual public sphere' by naming them "commercial operations, open to all who could pay and thus provided ways in which many different social strata could be exposed to the same ideas ." She also argues that enlightened ideas were transfused through print culture, a culture that became open to larger number of individuals after the' reading revolution' at the end of the 18th century . According to Outram, as English coffeehouses offered various forms of print items, such as newspapers, journals and some of the latest books, they are to be considered within the public sphere of the Enlightenment . Historian James Van Horn Melton offers another perspective and places English coffeehouses within a more political public sphere of the Enlightenment . According to Melton, English coffeehouses were "born in an age of revolution, restoration, and bitter party rivalries . (They) provided public space at a time when political action and debate had begun to spill beyond the institutions that had traditionally contained them ." He uses the fact that Harrington's "arch republican" Rota club met within an early London coffeehouse to discuss political issues as evidence that English coffeehouses were depicted as centres of "religious and political dissent ." He also offers evidence that different political groups used the popularity of coffeehouses for their own political ends: Puritans encouraged coffeehouse popularity because proprietors forbade the consumption of alcohol within their establishment, whereas royalist critics associated coffeehouses with incessant and unwarranted political talk by common subjects . </P>

Who wrote the documents on the english coffee house