The Rhetoric of Fame: Persuading the People in Early Modern England

Kate De Rycker demonstrates that the social role of 16th-century English writers was becoming increasingly affected by the developing concept of celebrity. By looking at the 'Marprelate Controversy', the 'paper war' between the fictional persona of the Puritan Martin Marprelate, the established Church, and later professional writers, Kate De Rycker (University of Newcastle) argues that celebrity can indeed be considered to be a developing concept in the late sixteenth century, with the rise of cheap print, the awareness of an unknowable audience, and the language of rhetorical persuasion.

You can listen to The Rhetoric of Fame: Persuading the People in Early Modern England online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Rhetoric of Fame: Persuading the People in Early Modern England is an episode from Art and Action: The Intersections of Literary Celebrity and Politics by Oxford University.

This episode is 27:20 long.

This episode was published on Apr 3, 2016.

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