Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain

by Joad Raymond

• ISBN13: 9780521819015
• ISBN10: 0521819016
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

By the end of the seventeenth century the most effective means of persuasion and communication was the pamphlet, which created influential moral and political communities of readers, and thus formed a 'public sphere' of popular, political opinion. This book is a unique history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain and traces its rise as an imaginative and often eloquent literary form. Using a long-term perspective and a broad range of historical, bibliographical and textual evidence, the book sketches a complex definition of a 'pamphlet', showing the coherence of the literary form, the diversity of genres and imaginative devices employed by pamphleteers; and it explores readers' relationship with pamphlets and how both influenced politics. Individual chapters examine topics such as Elizabethan religious controversy, the book trade, the distribution of books and pamphlets, pamphleteering in the English Civil War, women and gender, and print in the Restoration.

Table of Contents

Prologue: changing experiences, 1588, 1642, 1688

1. What is a pamphlet?

2. 'How loudely they cry': Marprelate, purity and paper bullets

3. 'Stitchers, Binders, Stationers, Hawkers': Printing practices and the book trade

4. 'A mongrel race of Mercuries lately sprung up': the business of news, c. 1580-1660

5. 'From words to blowes': Scottish origins of the explosion of print, 1637-42

6. 'This bookish partiall formall fierce factious animositous age': Printing revolutions 1641-60

7. 'Speaking abroad': Gender, female authorship and pamphleteering

8. 'A Bog of Plots, Sham-plots, Subordinations and Perjuries': Pamphlets and polemic in the Restoration

Epilogue.