The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition

by Edited by Joseph Black

• ISBN13: 9780521875790
• ISBN10: 052187579X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vi
Acknowledgments	p. vii
Notes on conventions	p. ix
List of abbreviations	p. xi
Introduction	p. xv
"Scurrilous pamphletts"	p. xv
The Presbyterian background	p. xviii
Martinist style	p. xxv
Authorship: Job Throkmorton, with John Penry	p. xxxiv
The Martinist community and the Marprelate press	p. xlvi
The anti-Martinist campaign, 1588-1590	p. lvi
Martinism and anti-Martinism, 1590-1700	p. lxxiv
Textual Introduction	p. cxiii
The Martin Marprelate Tracts
The Epistle	p. 3
The Epitome	p. 49
Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints	p. 89
Hay any Work for Cooper	p. 97
These Martinianae	p. 143
The Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior	p. 167
The Protestation of Martin Marprelate	p. 193
Running heads in the Marprelate tracts	p. 209
Notes	p. 211
Works cited	p. 288
Index	p. 307
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