In this study Lander addresses the "consequential intersection of religious controversy and print technology in early modern England"(1). The historical narrative presents the "consequences" most significantly as an eventual emergence of the category of the "literary" in contradistinction to the polemical; in fact, the "modern notion of 'the literary' is in part constituted through a repudiation of polemic that imposes a historical amnesia, a willful forgetting of the polemical engagements of the past"(5). One of Lander's main purposes, then, is to cure the amnesia by revisiting the importance of polemics, as manifested through the public medium of print, in early modern culture. And the scholarly reader, whose forgetting is presumably not total, will find, in later chapters, some of the usual suspects: Foxe's Actes and Monuments, the writings of Martin Marprelate, Milton's Areopagitica. Yet the thread of the argument in the sometimes dense and difficult Introduction is not always easy to discern. Polemics is a type of verbal warfare, which creates enemies and friends. It creates and destroys social consensus. It was certainly a crucial tool in Protestantism's opposition of error with "truth," but such doubtful essentializing tendencies quickly ironized the political process, and any faction, including the Catholics, could use the press advantageously. Yet, pace Foucault, polemic has after all an important dialogic component - it is productive if not pretty - and thus can even be regarded as dialectical, not sterile. However, what it produces remains ideologically unclear in this context. The adjuration to try the spirit (I John 4:1) "is a mainstay of Protestant hermeneutics"(39), but contemporary pamphlets, by Lodge and Greene for example, seem deeply ambivalent about the social costs, and even ultimately the necessity, of the individual riskily asserting or maintaining (idiosyncratic) spiritual principles at this moment of history.

Such provocative ambiguity continues in the subsequent chapters. Foxe's Book of Martyrs is remarkable for the speed at which the record of a persecuted minority became institutionalized, but the changes in its various editions, especially with respect to its prefaces and indexes, must be considered closely. While the '83 edition, as opposed to the '76 one, attempted to "lift the book above the polemical fray"(70), the only political certainty about the book's history is its cultural centrality, since so many competing factions tried to claim its legacy. The Marprelate writings perplexingly managed to alienate "the very group they were trying to defend, the puritan supporters of a Presbyterian discipline"(106), though they nevertheless succeeded in popularizing polemic. In perhaps the most intriguing chapter, Lander offers a tale of two Hamlets, Q1 emerging as "theatrical," and indeed polemical in its presentation of Calvinist doctrine, while the more abstruse and "literary" Q2 "reveals a consistent hostility toward both dogmatism and polemic"(113), even though Lander later hedges this claim by asserting that Q2 "both dramatizes and repudiates polemical culture," which paradoxically has the effect of partaking in the polemical dynamic anyway (141). It is just here, I think, that the book's potential importance to current debates becomes most apparent. Q2 insists, Lander writes, "that knowledge and ethics are far from obvious and never easy"(141). This might be interpreted by some as a sign of "great" literature, not just the "literary," and if there is polemical potential even here, then what significance does a renewed attention to the "productivity" of polemical writing have for our current culture wars? This is a question the author, oddly in my opinion, consistently evades. In his epilogue, Lander, perhaps to save himself from the position of a humanist reactionary, argues, "I do not intend a quasi-Arnoldian argument claiming literary critics as the clerical custodians of a new scripture. My point is more modest"(230). The argument may in fact be too modest in its final assertion that the early modern period's "invention of polemic… produced a reaction in the form of polite learning, the category that directly precedes the fully modern understanding of literature as sweetness and light"(231). Since this is clearly not the current, postmodern understanding of literature, the book's main thesis begs the question of the relevance of polemic to our own political situation(s). I have learned much from the historical contexts presented in this book, and in fact have had my overall historical perspective on the period altered by reading it, underlining (for me) the importance of this study. For these reasons I rather regret the modest drifting off of Lander's ultimate rhetorical agenda, for his book does not so much "defamiliarize the present," as he claims (18), as it declines to take up a crucial and pressing relevance intimated by his own highly significant historical readings.