ABSTRACT
This chapter is a version of author essay "Promiscuous Textualities: The Nashe-Harvey Controversy and the Unnatural Productions of Print", in Douglas Brooks, Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England. The radical printed polemics continued, but returned to a language that although it remained heated was more decorous than railing language. This, of course, changed with the onset of the English Civil War, when radical Protestant writers returned to Marprelate for inspiration in their railings. The bishop's strong, if quite belated response to the Nashe-Harvey controversy seems surprising, given that these railing exchanges were about nothing of religious or political significance. The pamphlet war, in this way, allowed for the production of people, or at least personas, who are famous simply because they are celebrities. If Cambridge is the legitimate and legitimizing mother of university scholars, these scholars further establish their legitimacy via a kind of aristocratic bloodline of male authors.
