Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England

Inventing Polemic examines the ways in which the new technology of print and Reformation polemic together dramatically transformed the literary culture of early modern England. Bringing together recent important work in two distinct areas, the history of the book and the history of religion, it gives an innovative account of the formation of literary culture in Tudor-Stuart England. Each of the central chapters of the book focuses on specific publishing events: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, the Marprelate pamphlets, the first two quartos of Hamlet, Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr and The Anatomy of the World, and Milton’s Areopagitica. In a discussion of the Restoration publisher Jacob Tonson and the eighteenth-century literary entrepreneur Samuel Johnson, Lander also considers the way in which subsequent understandings of literature and the literary were shaped by a conscious and conspicuous rejection of polemic. This study is an important reconsideration of some of the most influential texts of early modern England, focusing on their relation to the charged religious environment as it is reflected in and shaped by the products of the emergent book trade.

• Cites a wide range of important recent scholarship on the history of the book and religious history • Makes an historical argument about religious controversy and the media of communication which is directly relevant to our own cultural moment • Offers careful readings of a wide range of primary documents, both literary and non-literary

Introduction: The disorder of books; 1. Foxe’s Books of Martyrs: printing and popularizing the Actes and Monuments; 2. Martin Marprelate and the fugitive text; 3. ‘Whole Hamlets’: Q1, Q2, and the work of distinction; 4. Printing Donne: poetry and polemic in the early seventeenth century; 5. Areopagitica and ‘The True Warfaring Christian’; 6. Institutionalizing polemic: the rise and fall of Chelsea College; Epilogue: Polite learning.

\'Lander\'s study is important for its sobering argument that \'the literary culture of early modern England was fractious, robust, and deeply polemical …\' SEL: Studies in English Literature

\'… there is a real contribution to several debates here, and this study opens up an illuminating perspective on some key aspects of the period.\' The Glass