Offering a fresh interpretation of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Robert E. Stillman's intellectually ambitious study challenges traditional scholarship by identifying the impact of his education by the followers of Philip Melanchthon-the so-called Philippists-on his poetics, piety, and politics. Sidney created the first Renaissance text to argue for poetry's pre-eminence as an autonomous form of knowledge in the public domain, and its consequent power to promote cultural reform.