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

by Jesse M. Lander

• ISBN13: 9780521120241
• ISBN10: 0521120241
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The disorder of books

Foxe's Books of Martyrs: printing and popularizing the Actes and Monuments

Martin Marprelate and the fugitive text

'Whole Hamlets': Q1, Q2, and the work of distinction

Printing Donne: poetry and polemic in the early seventeenth century

Areopagitica and 'The True Warfaring Christian'

Institutionalizing polemic: the rise and fall of Chelsea College

Epilogue: Polite learning

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