'Paper Contestations' and Textual Communities in England, 1640-1675 (review)

In this suggestive addition to the rich scholarship on mid-seventeenth-century English literature, Elizabeth Sauer sketches a series of the print controversies of that day, with the episodes chosen to illustrate how 'the performative text' might generate 'interpretive' or 'textual communities.' In a prologue, five short chapters, and an epilogue, Sauer also pursues her aim of resurrecting 'populist' literature of that day against the renewed emphasis on higher culture by 'revisionist scholars.' The whole is less than the sum of its parts, but it is easy to share Sauer's fascination with these materials, not least their relation to the writings of John Milton, both as controversialist and poet. 'Communities' are not easy of analysis even in much fuller case studies and the critical inferences drawn here from more limited evidence are of some value.

Sauer applies her method to some telling episodes. Areopagitica is productively read in the context of contemporary concerns about monopolies: this has become a familiar move, but Sauer sets an ethical limit to Blair Hoxby's exaltation of Milton's advocacy of the free market. Next emphasized is the role of reader as judge with reference to reports on the Earl of Strafford (Thomas Wentworth) and William Laud's show trials. Sauer is ever alert to the stagecraft of these occasions, not least with reference to the staging of Charles i's trial and execution, as well as the 'self'-representation projected for Charles in Eikon Basilike and contested by Milton in Eikonoklastes. Well-attuned to links between Milton's prose and his poetry, Sauer connects iconoclastic motifs in Eikonoklastes with those in Samson Agonistes. She also finds continuity in the ways 'textual communities' were generated by radical religion in the Interregnum and by later Dissent. Her epilogue revisits Samson Agonistes to good effect as a 'final theatre of judgment' at a remove from the later Restoration stage that it repudiated, not least when that work was published in 1670–71.

An emphasis on 'community' distinguishes Sauer's response to the challenge scholars face in developing the empirical norms of Anglo-American historiography with accounts of reading that draw on European phenomenological tradition. Examples of the two in productive combination are few and far between: for the early seventeenth century, Peter Lake's The Antichrist's Lewd Hat (2002) comes to mind; for the later seventeenth century, Mark Knights's magisterial Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart England (2005). The diversity of print publication in the mid-seventeenth century and its often less 'literary' or learned content have invited many attempts to make sense of it all. In such a competitive field, decisive theoretical or empirical breakthroughs are not easily achieved and the lack of more systematic exposition in Paper Contestations limits the book's significance. The term 'community,' for instance, remains loosely figurative here; in particular, the differences between theatrical and textual communities seem too easily collapsed. The book's prose also can do disservice to the interest of Sauer's materials and her argument: it is not uncommon to encounter the mixed metaphors, proliferation of clauses, and multiplying abstractions of such sentences as 'Here, in this palimpsest of communicative actions and utterances emerges a new nexus of the oral and literary traditions and a new stage and crucible for the formation of interpretive communities.' Nor has her press done Sauer any favours by allowing a number of printing errors, including two in the opening epigraph, as well as the persistent retitling of William Prynne's Histrio-Mastix as Historiomastix, however suggestive that may be.

Fundamental to this study is its assumption that 'The mass production and dissemination of printed materials was unparalleled in England in the 1640s and 1650s.' This claim deserves qualification but the qualification should assist Sauer's larger case. However many more titles issued from the press after the loss of government controls, the overall volume of material printed was still limited by controls internal to the press owing to the monopoly...