Themelios | Issue 35-1
Joseph L. Black, ed. The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. cxvi + 315 pp. £75/ $125.
In 1588 and 1589, seven anonymous tracts were printed by a secret press which called for further, far-reaching reforms within the Elizabethan Church of England. These satirical tracts were to be a landmark in English literature, as well as a pivotal moment in puritan efforts to replace hierarchical episcopacy with the Presbyterian ‘discipline’. The tracts were written through the literary persona of Martin Marprelate, a thoroughly scurrilous comic character, who was prepared to name names in his abuse of the English bishops. The Marprelate polemic was something new to a reading public: they broke with convention in presenting the puritan platform in a way which many saw as irreligious and deeply inappropriate given the subject matter. Many prominent puritans were horrified at seeing their cause furthered by such notoriously controversial writing. For most observers, serious subject matter necessitated a serious form and style.
The authorities used the tracts as a reason for placing severe pressure on puritan nonconformity, citing Marprelate for a seditious challenging of divinely-ordained episcopacy. The government of Elizabeth decided to fight fire with fire and commissioned writers to produce anti-Martinist literature in the same ribald vein. Many deplored this tactic, including Sir Francis Bacon, who lamented that the lofty matter of the organisation of the Christian Church was dragged down to “this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained” (p. lxxii). Many saw beyond the purely ecclesiological implications of the Marprelate tracts and recognised that the authorities’ response was legitimating the oppositional party and ensured the controversy would be self-perpetuating. Others realised that the authors of the discipline were writing for an increasingly literate and confident audience who could think through the issues for themselves and not accept the standard arguments for episcopacy simply higher authority imposed it. The opponents of the puritans recognised a growing tendency towards egalitarian thinking that was prepared to challenge imposed authority and officially-sanctioned orthodoxy. Younger puritans, frustrated with failed attempts to produce reforms via official channels, sought to remove polemic debates from the rarefied atmosphere of the academic cloister to the wider public sphere of popular debate. In that sense, the Marprelate tracts were a success. In terms of achieving the goal of replacing episcopacy with the Presbyterian polity in the English Church, the tracts were doomed to failure. Indeed, savage repression followed their printing. Black follows a growing consensus that the tracts were written by Job Throkmorton and John Penry, though authorship of the tracts is still inconclusive, despite an intensive investigation by Elizabethan authorities.
This volume has been published nearly a century after the pioneering work of William Pierce, who produced an edition of the Marprelate Tracts at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black’s new and definitive edition is a welcome replacement for that standard work and his substantial—and pleasingly objective—ninety-page introduction places the tracts in their proper historical context, though focusing more on their literary influence than any theological or ecclesiological importance. Much of the older scholarship had been partisan. Black has shown that the Marprelate tracts need to be seen in the perspective of anticlerical and nonconformist literature going back to Wycliffe and the Lollards, but also assessing their continuing influence into the seventeenth century and the trauma of the English Civil War. It is poignantly ironic to note that other puritans in the 1640s invoked Marprelate’s attack on ecclesiastical authority against what was seen as the newly triumphant Presbyterianism of the Westminster Assembly: “numerous anti-Presbyterian pamphlets of the mid-1640s consequently asserted a continuity from the Episcopal past to the Presbyterian present” (p. lxxxix). Polemic literature had, and still has, a nasty habit of being utilised in very different situations than that in which it was first penned.
The actual tracts themselves are printed lightly modernised and regularised in their spelling and punctuation, and this will surely facilitate a wider readership. Those wanting to read the original texts should consult the facsimile edition published by Scholar Press in 1967 or the digitised form available at the Early English Books Online (EEBO) website. Each individual tract is given a short working introduction, which indicates some of the history of its clandestine publication. Nearly eighty pages of endnotes give further helpful information and allow the reader to read the tracts themselves without complicated academic apparatus. This is not to be lightly dismissed, as the tracts are far more often cited and discussed than actually read on their own merits.
The Marprelate tracts raise important contemporary issues for the church today beyond their immediate sixteenth-century milieu: In what ways should form suit content? When does satire go too far in promoting the gospel? What are the correct channels for ecclesiastical reform? Are personal attacks ever justifiable? When and how should church authorities be challenged? Modern evangelicals would do well to learn the lessons of the past.
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, England, UK
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