Description
Book SynopsisScandalously witty, racy, and irreverent, the Martin Marprelate tracts are the most famous satires of the English Renaissance. This text was the first fully annotated and modernized edition of the tracts, with a full introduction which details their background, sources, production, authorship, and seventeenth-century afterlife.
Trade ReviewReview 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
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 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.
