ABSTRACT
The subject of this book is the political and polemical literature of the English civil wars and Interregnum. This material is, in many ways, familiar enough. Most scholars and students are now aware of the vast numbers and bewildering variety of tracts and pamphlets, of all sizes and shapes, which emerged from the presses between 1640 and 1660. The most important sources are now thoroughly and routinely explored, and the authors – whether poets, clerics, journalists, or political theorists – are well known. Where this work differs from other books on the literature of the 1640s and 1650s is in its approach to such tracts and pamphlets, and to their authors. It is as much concerned with why books were written as with what was contained within them, and it is as much concerned with the processes by which works were conceived and executed, as it is with the ideas and theories developed, or the historical evidence incorporated. Based upon a recognition that there are a number of contexts in which polemical literature can be situated, it seeks to explore one such context which has largely been neglected by scholars of the mid-seventeenth century. This involves recognising that many political tracts combined elements which were timebound as well as timeless, and that in order to gain a full understanding of their nature it is necessary to explore the events to which such works were intimately connected.1 The approach of this book is to cultivate the hitherto barren ground between historical analyses of political events on the one hand, and literary and intellectual studies of prose in an era of political unrest and upheaval on the other, not least by introducing into the history of the period some of the approaches adopted by scholars of the ‘history of the book’.2
