Description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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