Talk of the Revolution: Politics, language and paper wars, 1628--1652

Joining together methods from studies in the History of the Book and the analysis of Early Modern political rhetoric, this dissertation considers the relationship between propaganda and political consciousness in the English Revolution. In this period, the relaxation of censorship laves and the emergence of cheap printing technology produced an unprecedented explosion in public political dialogue. This dissertation reconstructs five of these conversations, tracing how writers developed a theory of polemical persuasion by arguing back-and-forth in manuscript and printed texts. Dialogue, I argue, uniquely enabled John Milton, Joseph Mead and Richard Overton to observe their rhetoric operating in an enemy's reply. In the midst of debate, these writers increasingly elaborated on the dimension of their language that anticipated a reader's response. The more that writers engaged in this self-conscious rhetorical behavior, the more that they articulated the political intentions of Ranters, Presbyterians and Levellers.; Chapter One, "'Strike out these words'," examines the handwritten newsletters Joseph Mead sent to Martin Stutevile in the late 1620s. To skirt the censor, Mead instructed Stutevile to "strike out" the dangerous libels he wrote into his letters. By engaging Stutevile's participation in disavowing these poems, I argue, Mead practiced persuasion without thinking of himself as doing so. Chapter Two, "Thus Spoke Lycidas," considers how John Milton heard his poem Lycidas (1638) in the mouths of protestors denouncing corruption in the Laudian church. Although Milton meant to include the clergy among the poem's speakers, this echo transformed its collective utterance into a partisan attack. Chapter Three, "From Recalling Thoughts to Recalling Readers," traces Milton's interactions with Laudian pamphleteers across his first two political tracts, Of Reformation and Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641). The more that Milton confronted his speech in his enemies' tracts, I argue, the more that he identified a polemical intent in how his rhetoric anticipated these responses. Chapter Four, "Making a Leveller Talk," analyzes the satirical caricatures by which pamphleteer Richard Overton impersonated his Presbyterian enemies in the mid-1640s. I contend that the two conflicting voices audible in these personae---the self-incriminating fool and silent author of critique-illuminated to Overton the reader's "right" to deliberate over opposing political ideas. Chapter Five, "Where the Mad Ranters Are," examines how Presbyterian pamphleteers created a laughable stereotype of the radical Puritan sect, the Ranters, in the early 1650s. Because Presbyterian satire shut down the reader's reasoned inquiry into Ranter ideas, their rhetoric about the sect became a harmless thought experiment in how political authority could inhere in diverse groups. In tracing satire's instrumentality in these five Revolutionary dialogues, this dissertation argues that writers transformed manual techniques for disavowing their enemies' speech into an operation in language itself.