The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition
"Joseph Black has performed a great service for students of English religion, history, and literature in compiling such an authoritative presentation of the Marprelate pamphlets.  Those who come to Black's edition will learn much about the nature of religious conflict in later Elizabethan England, about the origins of the vogue for satire in English literature of the 1590s, and about the rise of a polemical style that would find its greatest expression in the tumultuous middle years of the English seventeenth century.  Those coming to Black's edition will also have the pleasure of enjoying in their full display of wit some of the liveliest and most humorous pieces of writing of the early modern period"--Scott Lucas, Reformation"AT LAST, the most fearless and influential of Elizabethan polemicists is back among us. The pamphlets of Martin Marprelate became a byword for free speech in a heavily censorious era, and their style and form shaped the explosively inventive prose of the great pamphleteers of the 1590s and 1600s, Nashe, Middleton, and Dekker, as well as the radical prose writers of the English Civil War. Everyone will want to read this book, and many will want to own it. It fills a gap that has been felt by Elizabethan scholars for decades. We have read about and paid lip service to Martin for far too long without a modern scholarly edition to remember him by; and a well organized, properly annotated edition like Black's is essential if we are to understand or delight in his polemics as they deserve [...] Joseph Black is to be congratulated for the meticulous care with which he has prepared it, and Cambridge University Press for having the imagination to make these ephemeral but vital works available in a handsome volume."-R. W. MASLEN, University of Glasgow, The Author 2010