Forms of Dissent

Abstract

Since the heyday of revisionism, historians and literary critics alike have sought to identify those neglected traditions of radical political thought that preceded the revolutionary events of the 1640s. Literary analysis has proved important here, not least because it reveals the different discursive forms that political consciousness might take. This in turn has helped to extend under standing of the public sphere that developed outside parliament. Both of the books under consideration contribute to this endeavor by broadening our sense of political discourse, its key concerns and its influences. Andrew McRae explores how satire in the early seventeenth century helped to create positions of political opposition; Nicholas McDowell considers how the humanist curriculum of the 1630s shaped radical belief in the next decade, redefining our understanding of elite and popular religious cultures. Both books offer lively, subtle readings of complex texts; they reach well beyond the traditional literary canon to remind us of the ways in which the production and circulation of texts in manuscript and print were so integral in this period to the formation of political identities. Andrew McRae's Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State sets out to understand how an orthodox Tudor commitment to consensus and harmony gave way by the 1640s to some of the most devastating political ruptures of English history (1). Its interest is the libels and verse satires that circulated in the 1620s and 1630s, during a period when there was widespread disaffection with humanist models of political counsel. McRae begins by clarifying the dif ferences between libel and satire. Libel stems from popular tradition, whereas the models for early modern satire are classical; libel attacks individuals rather than moral types; libel circulates in manuscript rather than print. Yet, McRae also complicates this dichotomy. Of the two modes, for example, it is libel that