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