Scandalously 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.
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 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.
