The Martin Marprelate Tracts

"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, 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." "As historical and social texts, they provide an important link in a tradition of oppositional writing in England from the early Reformation to the civil wars of the 1640s, and their appeal to a popular audience contributed to the development in England of a public sphere of debate. 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."--book jacket.

Year

2008

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

2

Pages

416

ISBN

9780521875790

Data source: Wikidata