Jesse Lander opens his book with a straightforward claim: “together, the printing press and the Reformation produced polemic, a new form of writing” (1; my italics). Inventing Polemic is produced from five discrete textual “events”: two versions of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, the Marprelate controversy, the 1603 and 1604 quartos commonly known as Q1 and Q2 Hamlet, John Donne's Anatomy of the World and Pseudo-martyr, and John Milton's Areopagitica. The threads connecting these texts, as Lander explains it, were in fact tightly interwoven, for they were all produced to address the religious settlement of late Elizabethan and Stuart England. Their messages, moreover, were in large part reflective of the often-unstable means of their production, something Lander introduces in his chapter title “The Disorder of Books.”

Like so many recent literary analysts, then, Lander is studying the material effect of print technology on the content matter of early modern literature. Unlike most recent analysts, however, he is considering this effect as it applied to the stuff of religious controversy. An intriguing aim, and Inventing Polemic begins confidently. Lander's treatment of Foxe's Actes and Monuments focuses on only two of its several incarnations: the edition of 1576 and Timothy Bright's ham-fisted abridgement of 1589. Rather than looking at its other additions and emendations (it was, after all, a near-reprint of the 1570 edition), Lander inspects only the 1576 Actes's new index and preface. Limiting his field of vision allows Lander to espy a revealing shift of polemical target. While the editions of 1563 and 1570 expressed a view of Protestant history that was anti-Catholic, typically providential, and frequently apocalyptic, the 1576 edition is instead “clearly situated in relationship to contemporary debates between Protestants” (61; my italics). Lander argues that this particular book of martyrs became “an intervention in the Admonition Controversy” (61). But leaving out the voluminous documentary materials and tightening the narrative in the interests of economy, Bright's later abridgement (printed after the Armada scare) returned Actes to its original intent. Lander sees Bright's editorial omissions as containment strategies, correcting internal Protestant strife by reshifting emphasis to the external popish enemy.

The next two subjects are both hybrid creatures: “Martin Marprelate” and the two early quartos of Hamlet. These Lander studies through equally narrow lenses: what we can find in Marprelate's margins and what we cannot in Hamlet's Q2. Here Lander's pointillist approach ultimately works better with Shakespeare (whom he sees, in what is a methodological theme running through the book as a whole, as correcting the overtly Calvinist Q1 with a more arid, religiously skeptical take on ecclesiastical conformity in Q2) than it does with Martin, but both chapters prompt more questions than they can answer. This has less to do, I think, with the tight focus of his literary investigations than with the sketchiness of his contextual discussions of many relevant doctrinal, ecclesiological, and liturgical issues: scholasticism, logic, and conformism in the case of the Marprelate discussion; Calvinist doctrine, Protestant practice, and the always-vexing question of the “Calvinist consensus” in the case of Hamlet.

Lander's next case study concentrates on Pseudo-martyr (1610) and An Anatomy of the World (1611), texts generically disparate but, Lander argues, culturally affiliate as well as proximate. Following John Aubrey, Lander avers that Donne's creative conjunct of poetry and religious polemic reflected his interest in the “fashionable studies” of the early seventeenth century, an alliance made possible not only by the age's standards of education and patronage but also, simply, by the sheer fact of James I's claim to be himself both poet and theologian (145–46). Lander's close examination of not only the verbal content and rhetorical tone of Pseudo-martyr but also its table of contents and its several emphasizing typefaces allows him to challenge the picture drawn by too many literary critics. Lander replaces their usual portrait of Donne the reluctant controversialist with Donne as an enthusiastic polemicist—a man enthralled by the public opportunities afforded by the press, a poet who personally supervised the printing of Pseudo-martyr, his most significant political work.

The fact of Pseudo-martyr's printing allows Lander to present Anatomy, which came out the following year, 1611, as a corrective of the unabashed religious-political views Donne had expressed in 1610. Anatomy of the World was one of the very few poems Donne composed for publication rather than manuscript circulation; it was always intended for a wider public. With its rebarbative and ultimately quizzical tone, Anatomy's argument was crafted to challenge the very notion of religious and political certitude once so obviously on display in Pseudo-martyr. Lander argues that Donne's retreat into skepticism and indeterminacy represents (in a manner reminiscent of Q2 Hamlet) a literary turn that is, in the end, “conspicuously non-polemical” (179).

In this pivotal chapter of Inventing Polemic, then, Lander starts out by describing the alliance of religious poetry and religious polemic but ends with their inexorable slide toward divorce, as the religious politics of the early Stuart age began itself to unravel. And so it is hardly surprising to find that his next chapter is concerned with Milton's Areopagitica. Lander calls Milton's attack on censorship the “zenith of religious polemic in English culture” (182), a “polemic for polemic” that actually marked the end of the alliance between religious controversy and literature because it also expressed a curious skepticism about the purposes of print technology and the markets it had created. For Lander, Areopagitica is all about the polemic—not the print.

Lander goes on to show the decline of the notion of polemic as signaled by the ultimate failure of Chelsea College by the 1630s and concludes epilogically by suggesting that in the era after England's real wars of religion, “polite learning” took up the central place once held by polemic in the age of toleration. But these final chapters, while interesting, read like postscripts. Taken individually, the five preceding, substantial chapters of Inventing Polemic are well-argued, their topics closely and thus compellingly observed. As a monograph, however, Inventing Polemic somehow feels a bit less substantial: without a stronger narrative spine—literary, religious, or historical—Lander's exquisitely focused lens can sometimes be a bit too refractive.