The Martin Marprelate Tracts
The Martin Marprelate Tracts
£49.00
GBPThe 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.
- The only modern edition of the most famous satires of the English Renaissance
- Lightly modernized text, giving greater accessibility to all readers
- Fully annotated and introduced, providing the reader with everything they need to know to understand the text
Reviews & endorsements
Review of the hardback: '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 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.' Reformation
Review of the hardback: '… splendid new edition - the first since William Pierce's of 1911 … The sheer vituperativeness, polemical energy, and bold wit, with which he [the author] voiced these criticisms were unprecedented.' English Studies
Review of the hardback: 'This splendid new edition of the Marprelate tracts will go a long way in making accessible a fascinating and provocative period of ecclesiastical history. Black's sensitive and authoritative editing should allow the voice of Martin Marprelate to be heard loud and clear by a new generation of readers.' Andrew V. Cinnamond, Wandsworth Parish, London
'This edition deserves to grace the shelves of any serious student of the English Reformation, however one understands that controversial term. Beyond that, though, as Black's notes make clear, it represents an important contribution to our understanding of Elizabethan literary history: for it reinstates the political pamphlet literature of late sixteenth-century England in an honourable tradition that ultimately leads down via Swift and Hazlitt to Orwell. As such, Black's edition is now 'base camp', as it were, both for historians and literary scholars of the Tracts.' Cahiers Élisabéthains
'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
Product details
March 2011Paperback
9780521188647
438 pages
226 × 150 × 25 mm
0.57kg
Available
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.
