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 (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 Marprelates famous voice easily accessible and a full introduction details the background sources production authorship and seventeenth-century afterlife of the tracts.