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

Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. By JESSE M. LANDER. Cambridge and New york: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. x + 324. $85.00 cloth.

Reviewed by JAMES KEARNEY

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...