English Military News Pamphlets, 1513–1637

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, and they include 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 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and integral in the evolution of the modern news. This edition is meant to provide these scholars with a sense of the basic form and varying possibilities of the genre, to give them a sense of the genre in itself, and to allow them to compare it with the other specific genres of news and print culture in this time period. These 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 pre-history of the novel. Highly rhetorical in structure, they also 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. The edition is meant to acquaint both scholars and students with a representative sample of the better-written news pamphlets of the era. Finally, these pamphlets are fun to read. They are funny, vivid, insightful, and appalling, generally marked by a high level of readability, and often with gripping style.