With the discourse analysis as framework, this study focuses on the ethos, the representation of the Other and the argumentation in the discourse of religious controversy of the protestant Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. The corpus, which consists of the prefaces of two editions of the Traité de l’eucharistie (1598 and 1604), was subject to a systematic survey of the personal pronouns je, nous, vous as well as references to Duplessis-Mornay’s direct opponents, in a diachronic perspective (the two editions have been compared). The analysis has shown the discursive strategies of Duplessis-Mornay, including a subtle management of the ethos and the relationship with the Other in order to convince the reader. The build-up of an ethos by an interposed author (frequent use of quotations), observed in the edition of 1598, has increased in that of 1604. This edition is also characterized by an ethos of justification which intends to invalidate an unfavourable prediscursive ethos resulting from adverse reactions to the first edition. The ethos of caritas and the authorial ethos are also very present in the discourse of the author in both editions. In his relation to the Other, Duplessis-Mornay uses a strategic approach, alternating nous inclusif and nous exclusif, and referring most often the notion of vous dans l’erreur to authors recognized by Catholics themselves, through quotations. Only direct opponents of the author are stigmatized by their representation in the third person. Duplessis-Mornay’s discourse, in both prefaces, is characterized by a diplomatic and persuasive attitude.

With the discourse analysis as framework, this study focuses on the ethos, the representation of the Other and the argumentation in the discourse of religious controversy of the protestant Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. The corpus, which consists of the prefaces of two editions of the Traité de l’eucharistie (1598 and 1604), was subject to a systematic survey of the personal pronouns je, nous, vous as well as references to Duplessis-Mornay’s direct opponents, in a diachronic perspective (the two editions have been compared). The analysis has shown the discursive strategies of Duplessis-Mornay, including a subtle management of the ethos and the relationship with the Other in order to convince the reader. The build-up of an ethos by an interposed author (frequent use of quotations), observed in the edition of 1598, has increased in that of 1604. This edition is also characterized by an ethos of justification which intends to invalidate an unfavourable prediscursive ethos resulting from adverse reactions to the first edition. The ethos of caritas and the authorial ethos are also very present in the discourse of the author in both editions. In his relation to the Other, Duplessis-Mornay uses a strategic approach, alternating nous inclusif and nous exclusif, and referring most often the notion of vous dans l’erreur to authors recognized by Catholics themselves, through quotations. Only direct opponents of the author are stigmatized by their representation in the third person. Duplessis-Mornay’s discourse, in both prefaces, is characterized by a diplomatic and persuasive attitude.

Dans le corpus, "le corps dans tous ses états" évoque d’emblée l’Incarnation. Mais celle-ci présuppose le corps vivant du fidèle. C’est lui qui donne corps aux semblables sensibles et intelligibles par amour. En retour, ceux-ci le poussent à faire corps avec eux en s’y assimilant. Tel est le Christ, l’Homme-Dieu qui épouse la condition terrestre et donne corps à la métaphore. Son corps est ainsi le milieu qui conjugue les dissemblables du monde en semblables mystiques. Comme les époux qui se fondent en un corps autre, son corps est donc d’un genre troisième et mystérieux. Tout cela prend corps grâce au lecteur, que le corpus suscite car il en partage la langue qui fait corps avec la voix intérieure. Telle est la chair du corpus où s’incarnent le Verbe divin et les métaphores. / John Donne is a Christian. Therefore all his works center around the Incarnation. However, the divine assuming a human body out of love requires first that a living believer should give rise to couples of persons and beings alike though different. Then the believer strives to assimilate himself to the other couple member, as is the rule in a good metaphor. Such is Christ, who is both God and Man as well as a living metaphor. He is a third type of being, made visible in marriage. This is achieved through bodies sharing in the same innate interior words, which starts with the mere act of reading John Donne’s corpus. Finally, the body means Verbum embodied in language.

In much of the historiography surrounding print culture and the book trade, the worldliness of print remains a point of common emphasis. Indeed, many influential studies either assume or actively present the history of print as part of a broader ‘secularization thesis’. Recently, however, historians have challenged these narratives, recognizing the central role of religious print as a driver of growth within the book trade and discussion within the nascent ‘public sphere’. Yet the scholarship into ‘religion and the book’ remains fragmentary, focused on individual genres or persons, with no unified monograph or standard reference work yet to emerge. This dissertation addresses some of the barriers to synopsis by investigating the long-term print output of the largest social and professional group engaged in evangelizing Christianity to the public: the clergy of the Church of England. By focusing on the clergy, this dissertation evades the usual narrow focus on genre. In the past, book-historical and bibliographic studies have relied heavily on a priori classification schemes to study the market for print. While sufficient in the context of relatively well-defined genre categories, such as printed sermons, the validity of these classification schemes breaks down at the wider level, for example, under the conceptual burden of defining the highly fluid and wide-ranging category of ‘religious works’. This dissertation begins to remedy such problems by modelling the print output of a large population of authors who had the strongest stake in evangelizing Christianity to the public through print. It utilizes the latest techniques in the field of digital humanities and bibliometrics to create a representative sample of the print output of the Anglican clergy over the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (here 1660-1800). Based on statistical trends, the thesis identifies a crucial period in the history of clerical print culture, the first four decades of the Hanoverian regime. The period is explored in detail through three subsequent case studies. By combining both traditional and digital methods, therefore, the dissertation explores clerical publishing as a phenomenon subject to evolution and change at both the macro and micro level. The first chapter provides an overarching statistical study of clerical publishing between 1660 and 1800. By combining data from two bibliographical datasets, The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), and the prosopographical resource, The Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), I extract and analyse a dataset of clerical works consisting of almost 35,000 bibliographic records. The remaining chapters approach the thesis topic through primary research-based case studies using both print and manuscript sources. The case studies were selected from the period identified in the preceding statistical analysis as a crucial transitional moment in the history of clerical publishing culture, c.1714 to 1750. These case studies form chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which explore a different aspect of a network of authors who worked under the direction of the bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1723-1748), during the era of Whig hegemony under Sir Robert Walpole. Finally, an appendix outlines the methodology used in chapter 1 to extract the sample of clerical printed works from the ESTC. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the profound influence of the clergy on the development of English print in the hand-press period. It thus forms both a historiographic intervention against the secularization thesis still implicit in discussions of print culture and the book trade, as well as providing a cautionary critique of the revisionism which has shaped recent investigations into the Church of England.