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

Inventing Polemic is a learned and far-ranging study that considers how interrelations between religious polemic and emerging print culture of the late Elizabethan and Stuart (pre-Restoration) periods shaped a variety of literary genres and rhetorical perspectives. Lander considers such diverse moments of religious and print interventions as the Marprelate texts, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the first and second quartos of Hamlet, and Milton’s Areopagitica. Lander opens up a series of provocative questions about the nature of authorship in a culture of changing editions that are as much the product of printers or of the religious culture as of the initial writer of the text. Inventing Polemic is of relevance to scholars of religious controversies, print culture, early modern literature, and the history of the book.

Except for a somewhat dense second half of the introduction, this study is consistently scholarly and engaging. In the valuable first half of the introduction, Lander considers the prehistory and posthistory of early modern religious polemic, while noting the way that the emergence of print and the clash of various notions of Protestantism gave rise to the lively, often vituperative, flavor of early modern religious polemic. In developing this thesis, Lander engages major scholars on the emergence of print — Eisenstein, Febvre, Martin, and Johns — to find a balance between those who argue that religious controversies shaped print culture and those who claim, in contrast, that print essentially generated religious controversies of the period. Lander takes a salutary middle ground on these positions by focusing on the ways that print and religion constantly informed and created each other. Lander employs this perspective to argue against a dominant notion that print encouraged uniformity; instead, he argues that print culture encouraged the proliferation of religious divisions, literary genres, and rhetorical styles.

Lander’s first two chapters look at two highly influential, yet markedly different, moments of late sixteenth-century publications of religious material: Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (the Book of Martyrs) and the Marprelate Controversy. What the collection of religious lives shares with the controversial pamphlet war is the way that their identities as texts were created and mutated by print. Lander makes the important point that editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments differ significantly from each other in ways that mark the changing religious climate behind each edition. In the Marprelate chapter, Lander looks at how a series of anonymous, vituperative pamphlets were the product of a community of writers, printers, and supporters, enabled by the anonymity of print.

Lander’s middle chapters look at interventions of print in light of four theologically-inflected literary texts: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr and An Anatomy of the World, and Milton’s Areopagitica. Lander notes how the identity of the authored text varies depending on the role of author and printer. For example, he notes how significant changes between the first and second quartos of Hamlet reflect differences between printers who clearly wished to promote the first quarto as a performed play with fairly conventional Calvinist implications, and printers of the second quarto, who represented their version of Hamlet as a literary text, with complex and ambiguous responses to the major religious controversies of the period.

Final chapters deal with the intriguing rise and fall of King James I’s College at Chelsea — a short-lived institution created purely to cultivate the writing of religious polemic — as well as a chapter on the fall of religious polemic after the Civil War, when religious polemic was seen as a potential threat for starting the wars up again. Like the other chapters, these stand out for Lander’s interesting writing, careful and extensive scholarship, engaged close analysis of texts and textual material, along with an awareness of complexities in the shaping and dissemination of these texts.

In a work of such ambitious scope, there will, of course, be some areas of disagreement...