The Martin Marprelate Tracts
A Modernized and Annotated Edition

A fully annotated modern edition of the most famous satires of the English Renaissance.

Joseph L. Black (Edited by)

9780521188647, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 3 March 2011

438 pages
22.6 x 15 x 2.5 cm, 0.57 kg

'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.' English

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 text was 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: general [DSB]