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Understanding the political literature of the seventeenth century involves more than the intellectual contextualization of John Pocock and the 'Cambridge school'.1 It requires political contextualization of authors and texts, and the application of bibliographical skills, archival research and historical detective work, as much as it does hours of scrutinizing texts. This paper demonstrates the importance of both political contextualization and bibliographical detection for enhancing our understanding of polemical literature and the political process in the mid-seventeenth century. In doing so, it draws upon a number of historiographical trends. Firstly, it builds upon a long-standing scholarly fascination with specific printing presses, particularly those committed to political causes and engaged by underground movements.2 It also develops more recent attempts to integrate studies of print culture into analysis of Civil War politics, to shed light upon particular tracts with knowledge regarding the political views of those responsible for their printing and publishing, and to explore the output of particular radical presses.3 Furthermore, it adopts practices by which typographical evidence is employed to identify stationers, to uncover contacts between printers and public figures, and to demonstrate the uses made ofthe press by politicians.4 It demonstrates the value of bibliographical analysis for enhancing our understanding of the role of print and polemic in the political life of the 1640s, and the techniques for exploiting its potential. Specifically, it identifies and examines a short-lived and radical political press, or rather a print campaign, operating in London in the second half of1642. It identifies, and seeks to understand, a corpus of more than a dozen briefpamphlets, and it does so by investigating their authorship and message, the identity of those responsible for their printing, the reason for their published form, and the local context for their appearance. Only on the basis of such holistic analysis will it be possible to understand fully their significance in the emergence of political print culture in the seventeenth century, and to demonstrate that this was a carefully calculated political operation, sanctioned by elements within the parliamentarian ranks at Westminster, with the aim of advancing in the public domain a radical and aggressive political agenda, and one with which the press's backers felt unable to associate themselves overtly.5 As such, it facilitates an enhanced appreciation of an...