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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England Diana Barnes Lander, Jesse M., Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006; cloth; pp. x, 324; 20 b/w illustrations; RRP AU$160.00, US$85.00, £50.00; ISBN 9780521838542. Jesse Lander's new book is not merely a study of the discourse of polemic in print, and its role in reformation and post-reformation religious, literary and political debate; it is also a thorough historical and theoretical investigation of shifting understandings of literary culture. Across a series of textual studies situated both within and outside conventional understandings of the literary, Lander demonstrates how 'polemic, a new form of writing, … animates the literary culture of mid sixteenth- to late seventeenth-century' (p. 1). He defines 'polemic' by distinction to the medieval scholastic tradition of disputation, as a form that stages debate in order to reshape the opinions of a wider public, its readers. He prefers the term polemic because it invokes the concept of enmity, as the term 'Controversy', often used by the early moderns, does not. From the history of the book, Lander draws one of his most important analytic premises, that a printed text is not simply the product of an author, rather 'each document in [the] archive is the concrete residue of the multiple intentions of a plurality of agents' (p. 5) including printers, editors, publishers and readers. A key tenet of Lander's approach is his attention to the social dimensions of print culture, specifically to the ways that 'print enables new social practices and encourages new habits of mind' (p. 7). The strength of Lander's study is in his capacity to read a range of conventionally 'literary' and non-literary printed texts as social products and as potentially socially transformative. To claim that a literary text is the product of multiple rather than singular intentions is itself a polemical assertion that ruptures the order of books, and of particular concern to Lander, it challenges conceptions [End Page 200] of the literary. Perhaps Lander demonstrates this most clearly when he writes about canonical authors and texts. For example, he presents Shakespeare's Hamlet not as the product of singular authorial intention but as a contested field constituted by different printed versions of the text credited with different shaping intentions of publisher, printer and/or copyright holder. Whereas Q1 is an unabashedly populist text closely affiliated with its theatrical production, Q2 is a self-consciously literary text geared to a select but discerning readership. As such Q2 'dramatizes and repudiates [the] polemical culture' which Q1 inhabits (p. 141). Shakespeare himself barely gets a mention in this account. Inventing Polemic situates the invention and suppression of print polemic metacritically by 'Beginning at the end' (p. 1) with Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books (1704). The ideal of polite literary culture became popular during the Restoration when anxieties about the consequences of uncontrolled public print debate were high. The ideal is achieved by separating polemic and religion from polite literary culture. Lander describes how late-seventeenth-century editions of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton canonize authors and their oeuvres through 'historical amnesia' (p. 5). Lander finds that the ideals of polite literary culture continue to inform critical analysis today. He challenges this anachronism by separating the post-reformation construction of English Literature from the literary print culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lander describes the body of Inventing Polemic as a 'constellation' of 'publishing events' (pp. 4-5). These terms signal that this is neither a study of a series of discrete literary works, nor a comprehensive overview of printed polemic. Rather, together these case studies demonstrate the pervasiveness of religious polemic through a range of print sixteenth- and seventeenth-century modes. Accordingly, chapter one reads the print history of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments in relation to the institutionalization of English Protestantism, successive editions are less keen to engage in polemical debate; chapter two accounts for the odd mix of literary-polemical discourse in the Martin Marprelate tracts (which makes them difficult to classify) as the product of 'a...