The debate between John Rastell and John Frith constitutes a previously unrecognized ancestor to Stephen Gosson’s attack on poetry and Sir Philip Sidney’s (problematic) defense of it. Although the nominal aim of Rastell’s A Newe Boke of Purgatorye and Frith’s A Disputation of Purgatory is theological disputation, in fact these texts constitute an implicit defense of and attack on fictions. Consequently, they form an important background for the Elizabethan and Jacobean “war against poetry.”

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Herman, P. C., (2025), "Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Herman, Peter C. "Early English Protestantism and Renaissance Poetics: The Charge is Committing Fiction in the Matter of Rastell v. Frith." Renaissance and Reformation 30 (1): 2010. 5-18. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v30i1.11476. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.