How to Read Polemic: Anti-Puritanism, Anti-Popery, and the Elizabethan Succession Crisis

Abstract

Chapters I outlines the unique problems of polemic as a primary source, the dissertation’s methodology, and important analytical frameworks such as anti-puritanism and anti-popery. Chapter II outlines the ideological and dynastic concerns of the 1590s to illustrate the mental universe of the polemicists of the following chapters; this contextualization introduces historians’ errors and assumptions that informed their narrow analyses of succession polemic. Chapters III, IV, V, VII, and VII contain close readings of five polemical exchanges in their micro-contexts of throughout the late 1590s to 1605 which highlights how source-mining has distorted historian’s interpretation of succession polemic. Analysis of the political and dynastic narratives through the lens of developments in post-Revisionist historiography breaks down the confessional and geographic silos that have also obscured historian’s understandings of succession polemic. The dissertation introduces several novel ideas: code-switching between ideologically incompatible polemical discourses in response to the novel ideological and dynastic concerns of the Elizabethan succession crisis, cross-fertilization of Catholic and Protestant polemical discourses and ideology, and the influence of French anti-Jesuit and politique thought on English polemic.