ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connotations of the common style of aggressive, stylistic perversion. It considers the historical background and cultural aesthetics behind Martin's metaphorics of perversion, then pause at the way that the entrance of the anti-Marprelates shapes a queer poetics of aggressive intimacy between enemies, one which overwhelms the purported moral and theological content of the works. The way in the Marprelate and anti-Marprelate texts, writers hurl invented words of insults at each other seem to toy with a modern notion of originality, one that the writers at once deny and embrace. Marprelate ably combines a complex sentence structure with informal, colloquial language to deploy a number of punning weapons against Bridges. The queer community is not the product of a fully conscious effort on the part of people who identify themselves as queer; instead, this new community of railers is an unintentional residue of the pamphlet war, but one which the writers nonetheless insist on metaphorically and figuratively.
