Thomas Nashe Books

When Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) published two important books in the 1960s -- _The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man_ (1962) and _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (1964) -- he seemed to be a Canadian comet out of nowhere flying across the intellectual horizon. Yes, he had published _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_ in 1951. But it received little attention in the 1950s. So when his two important books were published in the 1960s, he seemed to come out of nowhere. Thanks to Gingko Press, we today can now understand where he is coming from in his books published in the 1950s and the 1960s.

_The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time_ is the edited version of McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. In it McLuhan undertakes an ambitious account of the verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic) from about the time of Cicero down to the time of Nashe. From various comments McLuhan makes elsewhere, it is clear that he was captivated by what he had learned from his study of the history of rhetoric. Rhetoric has long been known in Western culture as the art of persuasion. The ads that McLuhan studies in _The Mechanical Bride_ are designed to persuade us. Even so, he may have been the first person to take ads seriously enough to study them carefully and write intelligent and witty commentaries about them.

Now, if it seems obvious to us today that ads aim to persuade us, it may seem less obvious that other artifacts in our culture, such as books as visual objects that are usually read by visual apprehension, also in a manner of speaking persuade and condition us, even though we may not have paid much attention to how this kind of visual conditioning does in a sense persuade us before we read McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy_.

McLuhan was on a roll. Shouldn't we extend our reflection to other artifacts around us? And shouldn't we reflect on which other senses and/or parts of our bodies are involved in the other technological artifacts in our culture? And don't they also in certain ways condition or persuade or impact us, even though we may not have reflected on these matters until we read McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_?

When we understand where McLuhan is coming from -- from studying the history of the art of persuasion -- we can discern a certain trajectory in his thought over the four books I've discussed here. And what about McLuhan's famous quip that the medium is the message? The medium as such persuades us as it is apprehended by us -- it massages us, so we can say that the medium as such massages us and thereby in a sense persuades us.


--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

Thank you, Gingko Press. Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made. Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural transformations. Here is the scholarship the academics said McLuhan lacked; rather he shows where the scholars themselves were lacking, and why he abandoned their methods in favor of Joyce, Eliot, et al, a way of living in and experiencing any present with both understanding and electric immediacy. Some of this appears in a very compressed manner in Eric McLuhan's 'The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'; it is developed more slowly in this book. Here McLuhan defined the struggle between art and science as between rhetoric and dialectic. Here is Mcluhan the patristic scholar showing that conservative theology does not mean ossified or dialectical; it means having at hand all the rich tools of the tradition with which to renew the present (remember, this is during the time when de Lubac, who tread the same waters, was under censure). Here McLuhan discovered percept in a living Trivium where dialectic was balanced by rhetoric. The war is indeed in the Word. . .

The Classical Trivium: The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time is a previously unpublished work of the late Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), presenting the story of western literary culture from antiquity to the Elizabethan age. Examining the divisions of classical Rhetoric, Grammar, and Dialectic, in a strategy that he would later refine in his media analysis of the 1960s and 70s, The Classical Trivium, he connects the roots of ancient philosophy with modern-day interpretive and evaluative techniques. More than a half-century after it was written, The Classical Trivium remains a superb lens through which to examine the traditions of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Divided into four chapters, three devoted to sections of The Trivium and the fourth to Thomas Nashe himself, The Classical Trivium is a "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy.

This book uses both sound research and imaginative intelligence to reconstruct the life of the writer Thomas Nashe, active in London throughout the 1590s.

Nashe was a friend of Marlowe and probably knew Shakespeare, he made an important contribution to the development of English prose and the novel, and at a time when government controls on publishing were strict he attempted to comment on abuses of power and political affairs in general. Too often, because of his notorious feud in print with Dr. Gabriel Harvey, he is dismissed as an amusing but lightweight pamphleteer. Reading 'A Cup of News' will correct any such impression. It shows Nashe as an eager participant in the growing intellectual and literary life of the nation at a time when English culture was at its most interesting and creative.

No-one who has read Nashe or takes any interest in the late Elizabethan period can fail to enjoy this book.

This book, for fans of Thomas Nashe or of 1600th century English literature, is a well-written description of Thomas Nashe and his mere greatness. I advise for any such mind who so dearly holds Nashe to their hearts as I, that this book will only spark within you a new sense of awe for both Nashe and Crewe (the author). --Daniel S. Batten Londonderry, NH