ABSTRACT
Mornay's animadversions upon that partisanship illustrate, the highly sophisticated awareness among Sidney's closest friends and intellectual associates of a public domain inside which the circulation of texts in manuscript as well as in print carries a persuasive, a determinative power to influence events in the larger realm of international politics. Melanchthon's championship of liberty is best understood in light of the history of the Philippists, as that history touches both on Germany specifically and the culture of northern humanism. The St. Bartholomew's Day's Massacre helped to determine the course of Sidney's education and the character of his piety and politics. Tarquin and Phalaris matter in the world of events as exemplars of tyrants who did-and did not-suffer for their tyrannies, but the tyranny that matters most to Sidney's internal argument descends from 'that tyrant in table talk', the historian. The argument of the Defence repeatedly performs a systematic downsizing of the historical within the realm of the poetic.
