SOURCE: “The Splitting of Humanism: Bentley, Swift and the English Battle of the Books,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 49, No. 3, July-September 1988, pp. 453-72.

In the following essay, Tinkler discusses the roles of Richard Bentley and Jonathan Swift in the Battle of the Books, arguing that their dispute is best understood in the context of the “splitting of humanist scholarship and humanist literature into separate literary genres” rather than in “the context of the commonplace debate between ancients and moderns.”

It was argued some years ago that the English “Battle of the Books” of the late seventeenth century was just another phase in a long Renaissance humanist querelle des anciens et des modernes.¹ The English Battle was thus another, and essentially repetitive, reworking of a theme that had become a commonplace. More recently, however, Joseph M. Levine has argued that an essential ingredient in the English...