The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition

by Joseph L. Black

Overview

The Martin Marprelate tracts are the most famous pamphlets of the English Renaissance; to their contemporaries they were the most notorious. Printed in 1588 and 1589 on a secret press carted across the English countryside from one sympathetic household to another, the seven tracts attack the Church of England, particularly its Bishops (hence the pseudonym, Mar-prelate), and advocate a Presbyterian system of church government. Scandalously witty, racy, and irreverent, the Marprelate tracts are the finest prose satires of their era. Their colloquial style and playfully self-dramatizing manner influenced the fiction and theatre of the Elizabethan Golden Age. This is the first fully annotated edition of the tracts to appear in almost a century. A lightly modernized text makes Martin Marprelate’s famous voice easily accessible, and a full introduction details the background, sources, production, authorship, and seventeenth-century afterlife of the tracts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521875790
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/10/2008
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Joseph Black is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Textual introduction; The Martin Marprelate Tracts: 1. The Epistle; 2. The Epitome; 3. Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints; 4. Hay any Work For Cooper; 5. Theses Martinianae (by 'Martin Junior'); 6. The Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior (by'Martin Senior'); 7. The Protestation of Martin Marprelate.

Editorial Reviews

"Joseph Black has performed a great service for students of English religion, history, and literature in compiling such an authoritative presentation of the Marprelate pamphlets. Those who come to Black’s edition will learn much about the nature of religious conflict in later Elizabethan England, about the origins of the vogue for satire in English literature of the 1590s, and about the rise of a polemical style that would find its greatest expression in the tumultuous middle years of the English seventeenth century. Those coming to Black’s edition will also have the pleasure of enjoying in their full display of wit some of the liveliest and most humorous pieces of writing of the early modern period"
—Scott Lucas, Reformation

"AT LAST, the most fearless and influential of Elizabethan polemicists is back among us. The pamphlets of Martin Marprelate became a byword for free speech in a heavily censorious era, and their style and form shaped the explosively inventive prose of the great pamphleteers of the 1590s and 1600s, Nashe, Middleton, and Dekker, as well as the radical prose writers of the English Civil War. Everyone will want to read this book, and many will want to own it. It fills a gap that has been felt by Elizabethan scholars for decades. We have read about and paid lip service to Martin for far too long without a modern scholarly edition to remember him by; and a well organized, properly annotated edition like Black’s is essential if we are to understand or delight in his polemics as they deserve [...] Joseph Black is to be congratulated for the meticulous care with which he has prepared it, and Cambridge University Press for having the imagination to make these ephemeral but vital works available in a handsome volume."
-R. W. MASLEN, University of Glasgow, The Author 2010

From the Publisher