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"The Civil Quill:" Print, Civility, and Conversation in the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel
Miller, Andrew C.
Miller, Andrew C.
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Text, Honors papers, English, Department of
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Abstract
This essay investigates the pamphlet feud between the scholar Gabriel Harvey and the
pamphleteer Thomas Nashe in the 1590s in light of contemporary notions of civil
discourse. A survey of Harvey’s marginalia shows a sustained interest in the use of jesting
and laughter to project a genially urbane public persona capable of carrying out a civil
form of conversation. In turn, his pamphlets are a complex combination of ironic libel
and a claim to bear the “civil quill.” Nashe’s contributions to the quarrel ridicule and
dismantle Harvey’s stance of civility and in the process create a subversive world of
printed orality and physicality. Placed in the context of the Martin Marprelate controversy
of the late 1580s and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, the insults and invective of the Harvey-
Nashe quarrel take on a sense of urgency in their engagement with the concept of civility
and its relation to the commonwealth.
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Andrew Miller granted permission for the digitization of this paper. It was submitted by CD.