Conversation and the polemic style of life : toleration and print culture in Revolutionary England

Though the fields of history, literature, and political theory have had much to say about the tolerationist debates of the 1640s, this fraught period has gone woefully underexamined by historians of rhetoric. Coupling rhetorical analysis with current scholarship on early modern toleration, Conversation and the Polemic Style of Life examines three tolerationist writers’ rhetorical strategies against the intellectual backdrop of their conversational habits and attitudes toward discussion. Across its four chapters, Conversation and the Polemic Style of Life develops the notion of a conversational rhetorical stance from which authors wrote in order to expand the limits of toleration. The first chapter establishes the relevant historical context and surveys a range of Protestant and Puritan pamphlets of the 1630s and 40s to establish conversation as a matter of character and to articulate several features of conversation in the period as they were translated into writing. The second chapter contends that learned conversation informs the poet John Milton’s development of a familiar style throughout his writings on toleration as he seeks to defend learned intellectuals from public scorn. Chapter three turns to the writings of the Leveller leader and merchant William Walwyn to uncover how his penchant for charitable conversation both informs and conflicts with his use of the rhetorical figure prosopopoeia as he defends the sectaries from persecution. In the final chapter, the chaplains of the New Model Army take on their critics’ frenzied polemical attacks by appealing to virtues echoing sermo in order to defend their soldiers’ blameless conversation. In addition to making scholarly interventions pertinent to its three main case studies, this project’s four chapters offer fresh engagements with rhetorical theory and toleration studies. The project calls for toleration studies to attend more closely to the analytical technologies afforded by rhetorical theory. It furthermore suggests that rhetorical theorists and historians of rhetoric have much to gain from studying the knotty toleration controversies of the 1640s. Finally, it argues that if we think outside of the classical rhetorical frame, we can deepen our understandings of how irenic forms of rhetoric struggle and evolve in times of political turmoil.