| Summary: | This article discusses the interaction between modality, point of view and ideology in Abiezer
Coppe’s A Remonstrance (1651), a letter of protestation written in prison by one of the most infamous
radical thinkers of England in the 1650’s. Point of view is one the most fruitful topics of stylistic enquiry,
in particular in its interaction with modality as carrier of ideological effects, but, as recent studies amply
demonstrate, it is advisable to adopt a heuristic methodology integrating a code-driven approach with
a use-driven model in order to account for a wider variety of expressive means for the realisation of
modality. As this article tries to show, in Coppe’s text this modal function is mainly performed by periodic
sentences and digressions, which act as modalizing structures in the text and, together with the creation
of weak implicatures, introduce a destabilizing element with clear ideological implications. The stylistic
analysis of A Remonstrance shows how this apparently sincere protestation of innocence is in fact a
layered, polysemous text that problematizes the idea itself of sincerity, uses a varied set of modalizing
elements to convey an alternative point of view, and produces interstitial (even subversive) reading
possibilities.
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