ABSTRACT
As a medium that is associated with a less educated and common audience than were the dominant literary institutions of the period, print is a site of ambivalence for the early modern writer. The women writers drive the points home by turning not only to metaphors of animals and perverse masculinity, but to the deployment of verse as a rhetorical weapon. This recourse to verse is somewhat unusual among male railing pamphleteers, with the exception of John Marston's railing poetry. Munda and Sharp, lived in a post-Elizabethan culture that no longer presented them with the living model of Queen Elizabeth. But it is also worth noting that, like Nashe and Gosson, Anger and Munda indulge in the very florid metaphors and rhetoric. Munda begins the associative process by associating Swetnam with Cerberus, an allusion that allows her both to give a certain demonic flavor to Swetnam and to call him a 'hell hound slanderer' who delights in lawlessness.
