In November 1588, an official investigation led by Elizabeth I's chief advisor, William Cecil, was opened into Elizabethan England's most famous pamphlet war: the anti-episcopal “Martin Marprelate” tracts. The authorities were asking the same sort of questions that academics ask of this material today: Who were the real authors behind these anonymous satirical attacks on the Anglican Church? Who was reading these pamphlets, and in what company? How many people were involved in each stage of the surreptitious printing and circulation of the pamphlets? As Joseph Black demonstrates in The Martin Marprelate Press: A Documentary History, the evidence produced by the original investigation provides an abundance of archival details not only about the way this “oppositional community” (17) of printers, preachers, and members of the gentry functioned, but also about the practicalities of producing and distributing a series of pamphlets via an underground press.
Twenty such documents, some in print for the first time, are brought together in this slim and user-friendly volume. What makes this documentary history so enjoyable is the clarity of its critical apparatus and an introduction in which Black provides a convincing chronology of events, explaining how these depositions, examinations, and legal briefs fit together. The spelling of these difficult legal texts has been modernized, though rhetorical punctuation is retained to reflect the fact that many of these documents were based on oral testimony. Generous headnotes help to clarify and contextualize the content by providing brief biographies (longer biographies of the key players are provided in an appendix) and by highlighting important connections across the different documents. The critical debate on the authorship of the Marprelate tracts is fully explained, for example, in the headnote to the brief against the Welsh nonconformist John Penry (Document 17). As the reader moves through the documents, the figure of Job Throckmorton comes into view as Penry's collaborator, most fully demonstrated by the extracts from Matthew Sutcliffe's An Answere unto a certaine calumnious letter published by [. . .] Job Throckmorton [. . . ] (1595), which are published here as Document 18. Sutcliffe was the first armchair sleuth to make a case for Throckmorton as the “principal agent” (124) of the Marprelate collective.
The clarity of Black's exposition regarding these documents results in a book that reads like a procedural drama. The reader learns of a mysterious gentleman dressed in green who appears to be the man behind the “Martin” persona (Documents 14 and 16), of manuscripts being left at strategic drop-off point on pathways (Documents 10 and 16), and of a heart-in-throat moment when the printers drop a case of type while moving the press to a new safe house in the Northwestern town of Warrington. When asked by curious onlookers what the metal items are, the printer John Hodgkins claims that the group are saltpeter-men (producers of gunpowder) and that the type is lead shot (Document 11, p. 71).
The content of the Marprelate pamphlets would prove to be as explosive as if they truly had been laced with gunpowder. Underlying Marprelate's humorous ad hominem attacks on individual bishops was a potentially treasonous grassroots argument for locally organized governance, in which parishes would not only provide religious instruction, but also oversee disciplinary measures and regional finances (11). The relatively anti-hierarchical nature of the “brethren” (as the printer Hodgkins calls them, 72) is borne out by the documentary evidence's focus on the collaborative production of these pamphlets. Some twenty-four men and women were involved in a coordinated effort to transport and hide not only the pamphlets but also the press, ink, paper, type, and the workers who would set, correct, and stitch together the pamphlets.
Black's Martin Marprelate Press is likely to be an essential collection not only for those interested in this example of Elizabethan nonconformist satire but also for book historians, who will find a wealth of evidence about the logistics of print: How long does it take for three printers to produce a long pamphlet like Hay Any Worke for Cooper? What was the total print run? Who supplied the ink and paper stock while the press moved around the country? The reader also learns of the working conditions for the printers while they were kept in hiding, disguised as “embroiderers” so “that the servants might know nothing of the matter” (64). The first printer, Robert Waldegrave, complains of spending two months locked up in a room in the Whitefriars safe house, working long hours without warm food (Document 10). The reader also learns of squabbles over the sharing of copies between Henry Sharpe the binder, and Henry Newman, the main distributor. This collection will also be useful for those interested in the history of reading or collaborative authorship. Take for example the testimony of Arthur Thomlin and Valentine Simmes, which details how Throckmorton helped to clarify some illegible sections of the Theses Martinianae manuscript by reading those interpolated lines aloud to them ahead of printing (69).
While the reader catches glimpses of well-known figures like Simmes, known to early modernists as a literary printer of numerous quartos by playwrights like William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Black's detailing of women's involvement in this enterprise feels especially necessary in helping to flesh out the numerous yet often fleeting mentions of women working in male-dominated industries. The defiant response of Elizabeth Crane, a gentlewoman who owned the safe house at Moseley, is here reproduced in print for the first time (Document 13). Mary Waldegrave (wife of the first printer Robert) also appears here as a key distributor of the tracts and, with one Mistress Newland, also smuggled type cases from London to Crane's safe house in Surrey. It is in these enthralling details of the risks taken by individuals, that this collection brings the Marprelate controversy out of the archive and will, one hopes, generate new research into surreptitious print.
