Chapter 7 explores the explosion of visual sources about Russia in the second half of the sixteenth century. Most notorious of them were the illustrated pamphlets about Ivan the Terrible’s attack on Livonia during the Baltic wars of the 1560s, where Ivan and his army were often depicted as hated Turks. An entirely different image of Muscovy was projected in costume books of the time, where the “typical dress” of Muscovite men and women resembled that of other Europeans, even if it was somewhat fanciful for lack of eyewitness knowledge. Finally, late sixteenth-century maps of Muscovy provide some illustration as well, often repurposing images from Herberstein’s account and costume books.

This chapter proposes that early modern women essayists invoked anger to negotiate new modes of publicity in the nascent public sphere. By reading the writings of Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and Margaret Cavendish alongside the history of humanist education, it shows that anger’s original object was not misogyny writ large, but the rhetorical training that limited women’s access to privileged protocols of speaking and writing. By the end of the early modern period, it argues, anger dissipates as the rise of salon conversation and letter writing expand the field in which literacy can be displayed, weakening rhetoric’s grip on the republic of letters.

Swift was one of the most prolific pamphleteers and journalists of his lifetime. One of Swift’s great strengths as a pamphleteer was his keen awareness of what might be described as his target readership. Appreciating that it is easier to confirm rather than alter readers’ opinions, Swift played on the prejudices of his readership. This chapter untangles the numerous and varied polemical strategies that Swift harnessed in his political writing, including ‘parallel history’, hyperbole, and character assassination. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of A Modest Proposal (1729), suggesting that here Swift employed many of the same polemical devices that he had used during his years as a pamphleteer.

This chapter sheds light on how mercenaries of knowledge contributed on behalf of the new King of Portugal’s sovereignty on the European and Mediterranean political stage. Alongside books and manuscripts, they used their access to Portuguese products, musical instruments, and luxury foods to improve their political leverage in Rome. In the hands and letters of mercenaries of knowledge, the diverse materials of bibliopolitics worked as the mute diplomats and political sweeteners of Baroque international relations. Vicente Nogueira’s desire to return to Portugal conditioned his troubled relations during the last part of his stay in Rome and his tormented advocacy on behalf of Portuguese affairs in the city after 1640.

The English free state or republic (1649–53) has always been seen as a failure, which almost no one outside the small coterie of its leaders genuinely wanted or actively supported. Historians have also belittled the importance of the political thought of the republican period. They have explored John Milton’s and Marchamont Nedham’s writings in defence of the republic but have mainly focused on de facto arguments that the free state could demand obedience because it offered peace and security. The Introduction explains how scholars have failed to properly examine the political thought of the period and have underestimated its breadth and depth. It also argues that, once we explore the pamphlet literature published during the free state, we can appreciate the importance of these pamphleteers’ political thinking. The aim is to offer a complete reassessment of the political thought of the English free state and to map the terrain of what it was possible to think.

Chapter 5 examines in the 1745 Jacobite Rising in the context of the expansion of the periodical press and the print marketplace in the mid-eighteenth century. Information about the events of the 1745 Rising was made available to readers in a more continuous and a more pervasive way than during the 1715 Rising. The chapter explores how this expanding circulation of information prompted greater concern not just about the trustworthiness of the genres of the newspaper and the political pamphlet but also about how citizens were consuming information. It next focuses on three genres of printed works produced after the Battle of Culloden (1746) that reworked newspaper reports into their narratives: accounts of the trials and executions of the rebels, “Chevalier” or “Pretender” narratives about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart, and popular histories. With their conscious and unconscious intertextual borrowings, these printed works, like those of the 1715 Rising, inscribe the cultural memory of the 1745 as a series of complicated knots of memory.

The Epilogue considers anonymous pamphlets printed in the later part of King James’s reign that deploy the female voice as a form of political critique: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and Muld Sacke. Of the cross-dressing pamphlets, Haec Vir in particular recruits the female voice for its association with militant Elizabethan values and the freedom of the subject, while the pseudonymous author Esther Sowernam ventriloquizes Esther, the biblical heroine who confronts the king. The female voice occupied a unique position in the seventeenth-century political landscape, allowing women writers to critique abuses of male power without compromising their position as dutiful subjects. Unlike the freedoms achieved by male citizens at the expense of women later in the seventeenth century, the “reasonable libertie” sought by men and women in early Stuart England authorized the voice of the wife/subject as a powerful political tool.

Chapter 5 is a key turning point in the narrative of the book. It analyses radical Catholic pamphlets printed in Paris and Lyon c. 1588–89, during a period in which the king was assassinated and the Catholic League controlled Paris and many other French towns. These pamphlets attack a now monstrous figure, the politique, for duplicity and for linguistic and moral flexibility. They confirm that the politique is shadowy and hard to define; this is part of the new politique problem of the late stages of the wars, which did much to create the historiographical legend of the Politique party. In these works, politique shifts from object of knowledge and knowing subject to object of opprobrium – but some qualities of the knowing, linguistically capable politique subject are retained. I argue that longer-term trends and influences are also present in source material as well as the immediate concerns of the crisis of c. 1589. This chapter also brings visual sources to bear on the politique problem, including two of the only known representations of the politique figure, found in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Drolleries collection.

This chapter considers the addressing of persuasive arguments, in oral, handwritten and printed forms and in Scots, English and Gaelic, and identifies rhetorical devices used to represent and express extra-institutional opinions in public communications. The analysis shows how dissidents worked to influence and exploit the views of supporters and how Scotland's rulers sought to manage extra-institutional opinions through a combination of censorship and their own proactive communications. The relative smallness of the Scottish print market and the gradual spread of literacy from elite to middling levels across this period meant that oral and manuscript communications remained important alongside print, producing a distinct communications culture. Though traditional figures like Lady Scotland or Jock Upaland were used to speak for the nation and people, over time collective opinions came to be represented in more literal terms as writers advanced claims about the views of the kirk, the godly and the covenanted nation.

In his 1995 treatise Fairness in International Law and Institutions, Thomas Franck described what he called the ‘reality-altering’ potential of the UN Charter’s system of collective security in these words.

This chapter examines ways of measuring the growth in the output of different kinds of print and, where possible, shifts in subject areas and genres. It notes that the confrontational use of print for political purposes was strongly dependent on precise context. As had been the case since the Reformation, the market potential of print did not develop in a linear way. To manage a printing business required considerable investment, as well as a good feel for reader interests and a willingness to take risks in times of crisis or repression. In those parts of Europe which had strong print markets, not just for books but also pamphlets, serials and more ephemeral outputs, we can therefore use the new history of print not only to underpin a better understanding of changing political cultures, but also to re-evaluate the complexity of political interactions outside the educated elite.