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

Polemical writing does not usually inspire much enthusiasm in readers of literature. Dogmatic, aggressively partisan, seemingly unsophisticated, polemic seems to lack all that we have been taught to appreciate about literature. Even in a critical moment that tends to makes a fetish of history, polemic gets short shrift. To be sure, literary critics will occasionally turn to polemic to get the flavor of the controversies of a particular historical moment, but polemical writing is so firmly rooted in the minutiae of the cultural and political world from which it emerges that, more often than not, it is consigned to the dustbin of history. It would be a shame if this long-standing bias against polemic in literary circles kept readers from Jesse M. Lander's fine new book. To begin with, Lander challenges this bias directly, making a convincing case that polemic is central both to the literature of early modern England and to the formation of the modern category of the literary.

Inventing Polemic advances three large historical claims. The first is that the agonistic culture of the Reformation and the new technology of print worked together to create polemic, a "new form of writing" (1). This argument seems designed to provoke the ire of medievalists and classicists who will no doubt point out all the ways in which early modern polemic is not novel. The title of the book aside, however, Lander's point is less about the invention of polemic as a form of writing than about its emergence as a visible, indeed virtually ubiquitous, category of text in the age of print and reform. Lander's second major contention is that polemic was crucially important to the literary culture of early modern England. Lander's point seems to be that polemic was integral to a world of letters broadly conceived and that the kinds of writing we have retroactively dubbed "literature" were shaped by the considerable cultural force of polemical writing. He is convincing on both counts. Lander's third and most provocative claim is that the emergence of a culture of polemic in the early modern period marks a crucial development in the "modern articulation of the literary" (4). In Lander's argument, modern conceptions of literature and the literary were shaped by an overt disavowal of polemic, as "the authentically literary comes to be perceived as the antithesis of the polemical" (4). Because of the historical parameters of the project, this argument is sketched in only briefly, primarily toward the ends of the final two chapters and in an epilogue. I hope Lander chooses to pursue this line of research in future work, as it offers an intriguing twist on traditional histories of literature.

As compelling as these larger arguments are, I predict that many scholars will find Lander's historical claims less interesting than his approach. Inventing Polemic participates in two strong trends in recent scholarship pertaining to the early modern: the history of the book and the history of religion. Lander negotiates the current scholarly landscape in a long introductory chapter, proving a particularly smart and sensitive guide. After this lucid introduction, Lander offers a series of case studies focusing on what he calls "publishing events" (5). More specifically, he examines the ways in which "an important discursive form—ecclesiastical history, theological controversy, tragedy, elegy, and political tract—is manifested in a particular publishing event" (5). Each chapter but the last is devoted to such an event: Foxe's Actes and Monuments, the Marprelate tracts, the first two quartos of Hamlet, Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and An Anatomy of the World, and Milton's Areopagitica. By focusing on publishing events, Lander calls attention to the ways in which printed texts are artifacts worked upon by many hands and are commodities positioned within a system of commercial differences.

In his chapter on Actes and Monuments, Lander contends that we should read the successive versions...