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This chapter examines how Cicero shaped his oratorical persona through the deployment of precise verbal devices (especially diminutives and irony), re-configuring his champions of the past by combining different aspects of their humour so as to construct a unified model of verbal wit that owes much to the tradition of satire at Rome, particularly to the voice of Lucilius. The orator could not adopt wholesale the conventions or persona of the satirist, however. Cicero's self-construction modulates political invective in accordance with the dignitas and auctoritas appropriate to the orator, and with the elegantia and wit of the urbane contemporary Roman.

This chapter discusses three major polemical works by Morison. It provides the first sustained discussion of the Comfortable Consolation, which was written to celebrate the birth of Prince Edward, and sheds new light on the Invective against treason (1539) and Exhortation (1539). All three tracts were suffused with evangelical sentiments and providentialist rhetoric that had important implications for contemporary views of Henry's kingship. Morison consistently advocated evangelical initiatives ahead of official policy, offering hope to other evangelicals. 1538–9 was a time of crisis for Henry VIII; this chapter situates the Invective and Exhortation against the internal and external threats to Henry's rule and examines the evidentiary basis of the Invective. Also discussed is the place of Morison's 1539 translation of Frontinus' Stratagems in the polemical campaign.

This chapter serves as an introduction to methodological questions on topics including the uses of genre-criticism, mythology, the question of “origins” of comedy and its utility for this study. It also establishes a working definition for “satire” and “mockery” for the book, and discusses current theorizing on satire. Finally, it proposes a taxonomy of poetic mockery, describing the various triangulated relationships involving poet, targets, and audiences.

This chapter analyzes two Greek myths — the story of Iambe and Demeter, and that of Heracles and the Cercopes — as a reflection of how Greeks could conceptualize comic mockery as “performance”, mediated by form, context, and generic marking.

The first of two chapters that focus on specific satirical poets act as test cases for the ideas put forward in this book. This chapter is a close examination of three programmatic Iambi of Callimachus, 1, 4, and 13, in the light of the book's developing arguments about satirical poetics. The more specific argument here is that Callimachus does not in fact regard his own iambic attempts as somehow a gentler, more civil variation of an earlier, more vituperative poetic form as is almost universally held. Rather, he sees his Iambi as an attempt to recover a generic authenticity that actually endorsed Hipponactean vituperation.

This chapter focuses on the Fragments, which is part of Herodas' Mimiamb 8. It presents Hippônax, who criticizes Herodas' poetry for crossing the form of the genre of comic drama and the metre of the genre of iambic invective. Herodas pleads guilty as charged, but none the less defends and maintains his procedure. This he does by invoking the sanction of the god of poetry, noting the signs of humility present in his closing comment that he will sing choliambic poetry after Hippônax. The chapter discusses the 'crossing of genres' as a well known and understood characteristic of Hellenistic poetry, in which the Hellenistic poets cross the form of the 'grand' genres, especially the hexameter of epic. It also mentions the humorous clash of content and form in Theokritos' fourth and fifth Idylls, where country folk pass the time of day or obscenely abuse one another in grand hexameters.

This chapter contends that, previous to the categorization of iambos as invective, it was Archilochus who was first of all conceptualized as a representative par excellence of blame poetry. It examines the types of content associated with Archilochus before the Hellenistic period. Such early testimonies provide information on the reception of Archilochus at a stage when invective emerged as the dominant feature of his work. They also suggest awareness regarding other aspects of his poetry. Thus, although Archilochus begins to function in the 5th century BCE as prototype of invective poetry, he is not simply reduced to that. Archilochus' reputation was a matter of ideological contestation, and whoever praises or blames him usually has ulterior motives.

The perception of Archilochus played a major role in the process of selection and reduction of the elements relevant for the categorization of iambos. Before the notion of iambos was restricted to the dominant feature of abuse, it was the prototype of the genre, Archilochus, who was taken to be predominantly abusive, at the expense of the thematic and functional variety of his poetry. This chapter examines the stage at which the perception of iambos as mainly abusive crystallized.

This chapter examines Conscience's first appearance in the B text of Piers Plowman, his debate with Meed in passus 3. Earlier readers typically interpreted this scene as ‘topical’ satire, in which Langland's personifications represent real historical figures. By contrast, this chapter demonstrates that the first vision of Piers Plowman feels topical not so much because Langland alludes to particular historical events, as because he draws on a series of literary modes—debate, slander and complaint—which are also employed by other authors, including historians such as Thomas Walsingham and the authors of debate poems such as Winner and Waster, in their own analysis of contemporary crises. In a manner typical of debate poetry, Meed is able to exploit the literal level of Conscience's representation, as a failed king's knight and leader of a retinue, in order to call into question his allegorical identity as ‘conscience’.

In his defence of his friend Milo, who has been accused of seditious violence for murdering Cicero's enemy Clodius, Cicero argued that, even if Milo had murdered Clodius, he should still be acquitted because the removal of Clodius was in the best interests of the res publica. Cicero's assertion of veracity, in the midst of a torrent of invective asserting that Clodius was murderous, rapacious, sacrilegious, unsparing of his own family, guilty of incest with his sister, hateful to the gods, and a clear and present danger to the continued survival of the Roman state, nicely underscores the problem of audience perceptions of invective in Ciceronian oratory. This chapter examines why Cicero feels the need for this assertion by analysing his speech for Milo as a case study of his use of invective in a judicial speech. It also discusses whether the audience expects exuberant ad hominem attacks not to be true, and if they do not, then what is the relationship of ad hominem attacks to factually probative argument.

China’s cultural and political future was contested through not just rational debate but also mud-slinging battles and arguments shrill with sarcasm and derision. Cursing was an ancient form of rhetoric, but modern print culture broadcast private arguments to a broad audience. The prominent political figure Wu Zhihui and the writer Lu Xun became famous for their use of invective, inspiring imitators. Then, in 1926, during China’s Warlord Period, a professor of linguistics named Liu Fu, who was associated with the literary avant garde, sparked controversy about the tone of public debate by republishing Which Classic? (Hedian), a mid-Qing novel whose protagonists are all curse words, many using the character gui (ghost/devil). The story of this bizarre novel and its reception illustrates how the use of the humorous curse changed from the eve of the Opium Wars to the 1930s, and it shows, in particular, the importance of personality politics and celebrity endorsement in the modern era.

This chapter discusses five anti-Catholic dialogues, all of which engage explicitly with highly topical issues. A dialogue agaynst the tyrannye of the papistes (1562), attributed to Walter Haddon, exploits the massacre of Protestants in France to advocate English support for the Huguenots. In An historical dialogve tovching antichrist and poperie (1589) Thomas Rogers sees divine intervention in the defeat of the Armada and proof of the ‘truth‘ of Protestantism. The chapter argues that John Nicholls's Pilgrimage (1581) and George Gifford's A Dialogue betweene a papist and a protestant (1582) form part of a government‐sponsored media campaign to convict the Jesuit Edmund Campion of treason. Finally, in A conference betwixt a mother…and her son (1600), Francis Savage tackles female Catholic recusancy, the long‐standing bugbear of the government and the bishops. A dextrous deployment of characterization and a plot of failed or successful conversion licenses hard-hitting messages.

This chapter shows three puritan dialogists creatively exploiting the satire and theatricality of the genre so as to attack episcopacy. In the heat of the Vestments Controversy, Anthony Gilby's A pleasaunt dialogue repudiates A brief examination (1566), pitting Bernarde Blynkarde, one of Parker's ordinands and a bishop's chaplain, against an enlightened soldier. John Udall's Strife (1584) has another bishop's chaplain turning a deaf ear to the truth. In Diotrephes (1588), Job Throckmorton goes further still, this time making a Lord bishop one of his cast of four, and staging his risible dependence on a Catholic aid. Then in 1589, after Marprelate had significantly lowered the tone, the Tyrannical dealing darkly plots the capture of ‘Puritan’ at the hands of turncoat Jack and ‘Papist’. The bishops have gone from being errant brethren still capable of repentance in 1566, to the friends of Catholics in 1588, to being instruments of the devil on the verge of converting to Catholicism in 1589.

In the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, poetic invective raises provocative questions about the nature of an authentic Scottish identity, pitting the lowland Dunbar and his heritage of ‘Inglis’ or English poetry against Kennedy and his association with the Gaelic-speaking region of Carrick. This chapter examines the poem in light of current extended mind theories, as part of a distributed cognitive system in which conceptions of national identity are constructed through ongoing processes of collaboration, circulation, and reception that make thinking nation part of everyday life. Rather than functioning divisively, the Flyting’s antagonistic presentation of a debate over cultural authenticity reflects the dynamic character of national culture, shaping the idea of a Scottish nation whose borders contain diverse voices and cultures.

This chapter examines the self-conscious Hellenistic poets who were concerned to set their own seal or sphragis on their poetry, and to defend it against its detractors. It analyses how Herodas proves to be no exception to Hellenistic practice with his eighth Mimiamb. It also discusses several points of contact between Mimiamb 8 and Idyll 7, in which both poems have a festival as their setting and involve a rustic contest over poetry. The chapter describes a dramatic element of Mimiamb 8 through the setting of the festival to Dionysos, the god of drama. It mentions Hippônax, who criticised Herodas' poetry for crossing the form of the genre of comic drama and the metre of the genre of iambic invective.

This chapter explores how the Catholic and Protestant churches respectively reconceived their theologies of mission in the final four decades of the twentieth century. Particular attention is devoted to the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968, and the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization convened by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1974. It was not accidental that this process of fundamental revision was concentrated on the 1960s and 1970s—decades that witnessed the rapid dismantling of the Western colonial empires, the emergence of the “Third World” as an ideological bloc, and the highly charged political atmosphere of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant missionary movements were the offspring of colonialism, but both regularly employed the language of global Christian dominion and both tried to use colonial governments to forward their evangelistic objectives. It was thus inevitable that the anticolonial invective of these decades should not leave the churches' overseas missionary activities unscathed. These years were also an era of social and intellectual ferment in European societies. Movements of revolutionary protest against established institutions and their perceived role in the perpetuation of structural injustice and international capitalism swept through university campuses. The historic churches and their governing hierarchies were often caught in the gunfire. Their formulation of their role in the world and even of their message itself could not be unaffected.

This chapter reviews the following queries: Why were al-Jāḥẓ’s books rejected in this manner? What was the point of the critique? What exactly was attacked? Was it the author’s style of thinking (Kalām) or writing? Did the work unsettle the attacker, resolutely determined not to be fashioned as al-Jāḥẓ’s ideal reader? Who was the attacker? Why is he unnamed? And what did al-Jāḥẓ hope to achieve by rehearsing his attacker’s arguments and refuting them by his praise of books? Chapter 4 considers these questions by putting The Book of Living in the textual environment of the third century, by reviewing attitudes to biographies and bibliographies, book writing and patronage, and by contrasting the formal indeterminacy of the Introduction with contemporary works. It concludes that al-Jāḥẓ designed his book to save society from the competitive strife in which argument and debate had engulfed it. Debate could now be internalised in the soul of the reader. This was made possible because books encouraged solitary reading and interior debate.