The hazards of professional authorship: polemic and fiction in Anthony Munday's English Roman Life

As a text, the English Roman Life bears testament to Anthony Munday's challenges as a professional writer whose course of career was by no means assured. Such challenges might help account for its republication in 1590, when it had the opportunity both to redirect its polemical engagements and to distance itself from the very polemics that had given rise to it in the first place. These conflicting purposes are perhaps most apparent in the book's final two chapters, which respectively take up the Shrovetide carnival at Rome and the astonishing account of religious radical Richard Atkins.