Religious lexis and political ideology in English Civil War newsbooks: A corpus-based analysis of Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus

This article presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of two influential English Civil War newsbooks which dominated the arena of seventeenth-century adversarial journalism: the royalist Mercurius Aulicus and the parliamentarian Mercurius Britanicus. Given the major role played by religion in the outbreak of the Civil War, the contribution focuses on religious words and examines their collocational behavior in concordances and larger stretches of discourse. The analysis highlights the discourse strategies adopted by the two editors in order to frame, confirm and legitimate opposite versions of the news events and construe ideological consensus in their readership. In a period of intense experimentation in news rhetoric and political propaganda, this corpus-based investigation documents the development of a strongly factious news style for a growing, politically biased readership.