A history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.

This unique history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain traces its rise as an imaginative and often eloquent literary form. Using a broad range of historical, bibliographical and textual evidence, the book shows the coherence of the literary form and the diversity of genres and imaginative devices employed by pamphleteers. Individual chapters examine Elizabethan religious controversy, the book trade, the distribution of pamphlets, pamphleteering in the English Civil War, women and gender, and print in the Restoration.

Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632) was a prolific playwright and pamphleteer chiefly remembered for his vivid and witty portrayals of everyday London life. This book uses Dekker’s prose pamphlets (published between 1613 and 1628) as a way in to a crucial and relatively neglected period of the history of pamphleteering. Under James I, after the aggressive Elizabethan exploitation of the new media, pamphleteers carved out a discursive space in which claims about truth and authority could be deconstructed. Avoiding the dangerous polemic employed by the Marprelate pamphleteers, they utilised playful, deliberately ambiguous language that drew readers’ attention to their own literary devices and games. Dekker shows pamphlets to be unstable and roguish, and the nakedly commercial imperatives of the book trade to be central to the world of Jacobean cheap print, as he introduces us to a world in which overlapping and competing discourses jostled for position in London’s streets, markets and pulpits. Contributing to the history of print and to the history of Jacobean London, this book also provides an appraisal of the often misunderstood prose works of an author who deserves more attention, especially from historians, than he has so far received. Critics are slowly becoming aware that Dekker was not the straightforward, simple hack writer of so many accounts; his works are complex and richly reward study in their own right as well as in the context of his more famous predecessors and contemporaries. As such this book will further contribute to a post-revisionist historiography of political consciousness and print cultures under the early Stuarts, as well as illuminate the career of a neglected writer.

Politicians and Pamphleteers reveals the importance of print to the English political world of the Civil Wars and Interregnum period. It explores how print propaganda came to the fore during these years as public opinion became a factor of dramatically enhanced importance, fundamentally altering the nature of the political society during the mid seventeenth century.

Reading Material in Early Modern England rediscovers the practices and representations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English readers. By telling their stories and insisting upon their variety, Brayman Hackel displaces both the singular 'ideal' reader of literacy theory and the elite male reader of literacy history.

This collection of essays explores the impact of printed periodicals on British culture and society between 1590 and 1800.

A study of writing, publishing and marketing history books in the early modern period.

First published in 1996, and here issued with a new preface, this work describes the emergence of the first weekly news publications, the immediate precursors of the modern newspaper. Previous ed.: Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.