Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith

Abstract

The debate between John Rastell and John Frith constitutes a previously unrecognized ancestor to Stephen Gosson's attack on poetry and Sir Philip Sidney's (problematic) defense of it. Although the nominal aim of Rastell's A Newe Boke of Purgatorye and Frith's A Disputation of Purgatory is theological disputation, in fact these texts constitute an implicit defense of and attack on fictions. Consequently, they form an important background for the Elizabethan and Jacobean "war against poetry."

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