This unique history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain traces its rise as an imaginative and often eloquent literary form. Using a broad range of historical, bibliographical and textual evidence, the book shows the coherence of the literary form and the diversity of genres and imaginative devices employed by pamphleteers. Individual chapters examine Elizabethan religious controversy, the book trade, the distribution of pamphlets, pamphleteering in the English Civil War, women and gender, and print in the Restoration.