Joseph L. Black's edition of the Marprelate tracts is a welcome development. It is deeply encouraging to see that such a project is still possible. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and poetry continue to attract editors, but prose is sadly neglected. The salutary correction offered by the move to unedit the Renaissance was a new awareness of the work done by editions, but it did not make that work any less necessary. Traditional editions remain a massive repository of scholarship, an accumulation of knowledge that is lost, or at least neglected, when readers turn directly to the original documents or facsimiles. Black's edition is a valuable reminder of the important contribution made by a careful and learned editor. His edition provides a clear, readable text, helpfully glossed and prefaced by an extensive introduction that constitutes a miniature monograph on the Marprelate phenomenon.

The preparation of the text is both straightforward and complicated. Straightforward because each of the seven pamphlets exists in one version, and therefore arguments about the adoption of particular variants do not arise. Black has used the Scolar Press facsimile as copy text, for six of the pamphlets the text was collated against seven different original copies, and for one (Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints) the text was collated against the only two surviving copies. In the process, Black discovered only a single stop-press correction in Hay Any Work for Cooper, where some copies print “Denmake” and others have “Denmark.” This is an interesting discovery, and it raises important questions about the procedures used by the Martinist press. No stop-press corrections might be explained by the exigencies of clandestine printing. The fact that any corrections were made is, thus, significant and suggests that someone acted as press corrector. But, why then is there only one example? It is hard to argue that a full collation would justify the investment of time, but surely one of the advantages of a full-dress edition is that it surveys and records all such variants. Details about the printing process have the potential to illuminate the larger Marprelate project. The more complicated aspect of the text's preparation concerns the decision to “lightly” modernize. One of the difficulties here is that Marprelate's exuberantly transgressive language is resistant to regularization, but generally Black does an excellent job. Although spelling is usually modernized, original orthography is retained for obsolete, archaic, colloquial, dialectical, and nonce words. In addition, punctuation has been regularized but according to rhetorical rather than syntactical principles. Formatting has also been regularized, with quotations in italic, but passages of dialogue are not marked by a change of font (an effort to be true to the “blurring of voices” typical of the tracts). These concessions to the reader are all sensible and applied judiciously. The one formatting change that presents a significant loss is the decision to print marginal notes as footnotes. There are several occasions in which the precise position of the marginal note and its relationship to the main text is of explicit concern, but this only raises one of the central problems involved in editing the tracts. If the book and its typography are themselves an expressive form, then the unruly typography of the originals, their sheer messiness, is part of the message, announcing an urgency that is diminished when the tracts are rendered in a uniform, modern typeface in a single volume.

But these losses are more than made up for by the gains in accessibility. One might quibble about certain editorial decisions, but it is impossible not to feel enormous gratitude for the extraordinary scholarship contained in Black's annotations. These annotations, flagged with a superscript numeral and found at the back of the book, go well beyond the work of William Pierce, who edited the only other full edition of the tracts in 1911. Since the tracts combine energetic wordplay, insulting anecdote, and serious ecclesiological argument, these notes are essential for the uninitiated reader, but they are also a boon for the serious student of the tracts. Black has brought to bear the fruit of years of serious research, and the results are consistently illuminating. Especially invaluable are the notes that clarify Marprelate's many citations and allusions; they provide a rich introduction to the world of Elizabethan religious controversy.

The introduction itself performs a similar function; at 111 pages, it is a substantial essay in its own right. Black provides the sort of background that one would expect—placing the tracts within the context of late Elizabethan pamphlet warfare and the ecclesiological controversy over Presbyterianism. He gives a crisp account of Marprelate's style—the aspect of the tracts that has received the greatest degree of scholarly attention from literary scholars. He takes up the question of authorship and argues that Job Throkmorton was the principal author but that he worked in collaboration with John Penry. However, this idea of collaboration is expanded in what is the freshest part of the introduction: a careful reconsideration of the printing history of the pamphlets. While patiently reconstructing events, Black emphasizes the range of support that the Marprelate press enjoyed, an argument worth stressing given that some recent accounts have seen the episode as an expression of marginal radicalism, a position that is easier to maintain when the admittedly hot-headed Throkmorton is isolated as the irresponsible party. A section on the official anti-Martinist campaign, a version of which has already appeared in essay form, is followed by an account of the afterlife of Martin that makes it clear that the tracts were suppressed but not forgotten. The usual account suggests that the Marprelate tracts were the last gasp of a Presbyterian movement on the verge of collapse and that their appearance only hastened the demise of what Patrick Collinson once termed the Elizabethan puritan movement. The repudiation of Marprelate was nearly total, and his peculiar brand of polemic was revived only when the political fortunes of Presbyterianism were ascendant in the 1640s. Black is able to flesh out this overly schematic narrative, but the basic shape remains the same. The Leveller Richard Overton's self-fashioning as Martin Marpriest, a son of Marprelate, cemented the connection between popular polemic and radical politics. Although Marprelate continued to be invoked during the Restoration, by the end of the seventeenth century he was increasingly becoming an object not of mimicry or mockery but of scholarly attention. However, only now has Marprelate gotten the editor he so richly deserves.