"We Must Fight with Paper and Pens": Spanish Elizabethan Polemics, 1585-1598

Abstract

This dissertation examines books written by a group of English Catholic exiles who, because of their close ties with the Spanish Monarchy, have been called Spanish Elizabethans. It focuses primarily--though not exclusively--on two major texts in several editions and translations: Nicholas Sander's De origine ac progressu scismatis Anglicani and the anonymous A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland. The texts in question were written between 1585 and 1598, a period that saw the escalation of Anglo-Spanish strife and actual war between the two kingdoms. These books were all meant to play a role in anti-Elizabethan efforts by Catholic potentates on the Continent, primarily Philip II, King of Spain.

To the extent that Spanish Elizabethan works have been studied, they have been examined through the prism of an English or English Catholic historiography. This dissertation tells a story with a set of broader implications. Because Spanish Elizabethan books were written on the Continent, often for, or at the behest of Catholic powers there, the perspective taken here is broadly European. Because they were written by a group of exiles who led peripatetic lives, who were wholly dependent on an array of different allies and benefactors in a shifting, multi-polar geo-political environment, these books had to be pliable. Each was tweaked to take advantage of immediate political and cultural contexts. This dissertation is consequently a transnational account of men without a nation actively re-working texts to fit into different discursive spheres. Their works are thus hard to pin down-- they are, to be sure, English Catholic, but they can also be considered Spanish, ligueur, and papalist in turn or all at once.

Through a focused examination of textual changes at precise political junctures this dissertation is also an exercise in reading "texts in contexts." It differs from other such efforts in that it does not seek the types of ideological coherences which are generally at the core of intellectual histories. Instead, the closer we look at polemics from a "ground-level," the more disorder we perceive and the better we can understand the contingent nature of early modern paper wars.