"He tells us that": Strategies of reporting adversarial news in the English Civil War

In my article I examine a form of argumentation employed by one of the most prominent parliamentarian news pamphlets of the English Civil War period (1642-1649). The pamphlet in question was Mercurius Britanicus, that was founded to counter through its pages the news that was being published in Mercurius Aulicus, the foremost royalist publication. In its animadversion of Aulicus’s news, Britanicus first repeated the royalist text, and then responded to it. In my study I shall focus on instances where the not wholly faithful reporting of Aulicus’s text leads to (socio)pragmatic meanings. I have taken into consideration both the wider social context in which the pamphlet writers were writing as well as the immediate situational context–the pamphlet as genre. In my analysis of Britanicus’s animadversion, I examine titles of courtesy, the omission and substitution of words, and factuality.