Dismembered rhetoric

Dismembered Rhetoric describes the rhetoric of devotional publications by the Catholic secret presses between 1580 and 1603. A myth persists of a chasm between the Protestant battle cry of "Bible" and the Catholic approach to the laity through sacrament rather than word. However, Catholic authors did employ formal rhetoric to guide the devotions of the reader. Writers such as Robert Persons, William Allen, Henry Garnet, Edmund Campion, and Robert Southwell recognized that these techniques did not emasculate the chaste prose of their "shining band of martyrs.". Ceri Sullivan looks at all devotional texts in English produced by Catholic and overseas presses during the intense period of government repression of "papists." While the official rhetoric denied the power and centrality of these texts, they were consumed by Catholic, church-papist, and Anglican, providing matter for later, more famous writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Henry Constable. She shows how they are unabashed in their use of formal oratory to capture the passion and will of a reader. Texts were both part of the mission effort to reconvert Britain, and in providing matter for internal conversion, creating devotion where a dilettante taste for style had once fed.