English Military News Pamphlets, 1513–1637 (Volume 379) (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies)

This critical edition includes fifteen English military news pamphlets illustrating the development of the genre from its birth in 1513 to the outbreak of the British Civil Wars in 1637. They include examples fairly evenly distributed in time: accounts of battles in Scotland and Ireland, the Netherlands and France, Malta and Hungary, Russia and New England; pamphlets drawn from letters written by Englishmen, or pamphlets written by a variety of continental Europeans, both Protestant and Catholic; accounts of battles, sieges, and extended campaigns. They include pamphlets by the four most famous literary contributors to the genre: George Gascoigne, Thomas Churchyard, Anthony Nixon, and Hugh Peters, as well as reports of some notable historical events: the siege of Malta (1566), the sack of Antwerp (1576), the battle of Ivry (1590), and the battle of Kinsale (1602). These news pamphlets provide examples of Renaissance English print culture, and register both the popular English interest in military and foreign news and the ability of the press to satisfy this interest. Moreover, military news pamphlets were a considerable proportion of the entire corpus of news pamphlets in the 16th and 17th centuries, and integral in the evolution of the modern news. The reports, which register the shifting diction of Renaissance English and deploy a variety of novelistic techniques, also illustrate the transformation of early modern English prose and the prehistory of the novel. Highly rhetorical in structure, they demonstrate the link between medieval and Renaissance rhetorical practice and early modern and modern journalistic style. The reports also provide a window into the everyday life of Renaissance soldiery and the world of Renaissance warfare on land. Finally, these pamphlets are fun to read. They are funny, vivid, insightful and appalling; generally marked by a high level of readability and written in a gripping style.