Pamphlet wars: The Marprelate tracts and 'Martinism,' 1588-1688.

摘要

I examine pamphlet warfare in England from the late sixteenth century through to the Restoration, focusing on the production, reception, and seventeenth-century history of the Martin Marprelate tracts (1588-89). I argue that the tracts provide a link in a tradition of oppositional writing that extends from the English Reformation to the civil war, and that debate generated by Martin's polemical strategies reflects contemporary negotiations over the uses of print. My primary concerns are with issues of authorship raised by anonymous or collaborative texts; polemical continuity and the rhetoric of allusion; underground printing and the function of texts in communities defined by common religious or political agendas; the development of a public sphere through the battle for a widely conceived audience; and the modification of polemical conventions to create a language of discussion that could appeal to that audience.;Chapter One sketches the logistics of underground printing in renaissance England, and raises questions about the idea of an author in an enterprise that draws widely on community resources. Chapter Two discusses the tracts themselves, in particular the relationship between Martinist style and Presbyterian eccelesiology. Chapter Three examines the anti-Martinist campaign and the influential set of anti-reform arguments it formulated. Chapter Four traces references to the Marprelate tracts from the 1590s to the civil war, concluding with their reappearance in works published by the community of Laudian exiles in the Low Countries. Chapter Five begins with the Scottish propaganda that accompanied the two Bishops' Wars (1639-40), and examines the role of the Marprelate tracts and other Elizabethan works during the debates between king and parliament in the early 1640s; the chapter ends with the neo-Martinist pamphleteering of Leveller Richard Overton. The Conclusion follows the tracts into Restoration debates over toleration, particularly those between Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker, where Martin Marprelate continued to play a role in pamphlet wars by providing a synecdoche for the discursive consequences of the civil war.