The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History

The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History offers a freshly edited collection of twenty primary documents, mainly from manuscript archival sources, connected with the underground press that produced the Martin Marprelate tracts (1588–1589), the anti-episcopal satires that sparked the most famous pamphlet war of the English Renaissance. These depositions, examinations, investigative summaries, trial records, and other documents provide extraordinary evidence, unmatched for early modern England, for the day-to-day workings of an underground print campaign. Many of these documents have never appeared in print. As a collection, these materials are of interest to scholars who work in Tudor and Stuart literature, politics, religion, law, and the history of books and reading. Spelling is modernized for accessibility, and each document is annotated and supplied with a headnote that explains its context and implications. A short introduction outlines the broader social, cultural, and historical significance of the Marprelate controversy as a whole.

"The scholarly research is very sound and very well-written."
-Micheline White, Associate Professor in the College of the Humanities and the Department of English, Carleton University

"This is a timely and reliable critical edition of an important set of documents which enriches our knowledge of the socio-religious complexity of the late Elizabethan period. The Introduction is informative, presents a wealth of evidence in an accessible style, and offers a persuasive narrative about the network of persons involved in the creation, production, and distribution of the pamphlets."
-Goran Stanivukovic, Professor of English, Saint Mary’s University

JOSEPH L. BLACK is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with research interests in Renaissance non-dramatic literature and book history. In addition to The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (2008), his books include Private Libraries of Renaissance England, vols. 7–10 (2009–20), all with R. J. Fehrenbach, and The Library of the Sidney Family of Penshurst Place (2013), with Germaine Warkentin and William R. Bowen. His major current project is a Clarendon edition of the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe in 6 volumes, co-edited with Andrew Hadfield, Jennifer Richards, and Cathy Shrank.