ABSTRACT
For Sidney, print poses a sinister threat both to prose and poetry; and he depicts the impact of print-culture on poetry as an assault on the mouseion and a rape of the Muses. Sidney's attitude towards the relationship between literature and learning was complex. Harvey himself had witnessed Sidney's wide-ranging intellectual curiosity at first hand, when he had read the Roman historian Livy with Sidney in the late 1570s. His call to his fellow gentlemen to publish their works, and so take up arms against the army of bastard poets, was already too late, however. Sidney can never quite rid himself of the idea that poetry is a 'camp-follower', whose charms tend to debilitate rather than fortify the virile martialist. There were plenty of legendary and historical women whose strengths and virtues would have made them more appropriate figures for poetry than the figure of Venus.
