The Battle of The Books by Jonathan Swift | Context, Summary, Analysis

The Battle of The Books is a mock-heroic written by Jonathan Swift that was first published in 1704. It is a light-hearted satire to ridicule the contemporary modern authors of Swift’s era while he defended the classicist Ancient writers. Jonathan Swift was the assistant of Sir William Temple who wrote “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning“ in 1692. This essay by Temple raised the debate of Ancient versus Modern in which Temple favored Ancient writers and concluded that the Moderns had, in fact, very little to add to the store of knowledge that had been inherited from the classical past. Temple used the metaphor of dwarf and giant in his essay and suggested that modern man was just a dwarf standing upon the “shoulders of giants,“ that is, the modern man saw farther because he begins with the observations and learning of the ancients. Temple’s essay was opposed by Richard Bentley, the classicist librarian of the Royal Library and critic William Wotton too published his own essay op