SOURCE: “Jonathan Swift's Battle of the Books: Its Background and Satire,” in Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, Vol. 16, 1983, pp. 265-72.

In the following essay, Dahiyat summarizes the background of the Battle of the Books, primarily in England, and analyzes Swift's book within this context.

The seventeenth century in England had witnessed a series of conflicting standpoints and attitudes in religion, politics and learning. In religion and politics the controversy reached a tragic summit, when the opposing parties took to arms to silence one another. In the field of learning, the controversy was not less vehement and emotional than the politico-religious one. It was, however, carried out peacefully except in “St. James's Library!”

To spotlight the very beginning of the Ancient-Modern controversy is not an easy thing to do for sure; perhaps impossible. But, for the sake of convenience, one can take Bacon as the “man largely responsible for creating the...