Recent historiography of the salons has been dominated by Jürgen Habermas' work, "The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" (triggered largely by its translation into French, in 1978, and then English, in 1989), which argued that the salons were of great historical importance. Theaters of conversation and exchange – such as the salons, and the coffeehouses in England – played a critical role in the emergence of what Habermas termed the "public sphere", which emerged in "cultural-political contrast" to court society. Thus, while women retained a dominant role in the historiography of the salons, the salons received increasing amounts of study, much of it in direct response to, or heavily influenced by Habermas' theory.