Martin Marprelate and the Fugitive Text

Abstract As is often the case with scandalous books, the Marprelate tracts are far more often invoked than analysed. In the following article, rather than dismiss the pamphlets as an irresponsible and evanescent bout of radicalism, I make a tripartite argument for taking their discursive strategies seriously. First, the Marprelate tracts reveal both a careful and sustained awareness and an exploitation of print conventions. Martin's attention to the specifics of print and the material book indicate a sophisticated appreciation for print as a polemical resource. Secondly, though the pamphlets are marked by passionate intensity, they remain committed to a rational form of discourse. In pursuing this claim, rather than dwell on Marprelate's incendiary use of the scurrilous anecdote, I look instead at these texts' continuing attachment to the syllogism as the crucial form of argument. This intoxicating cocktail of scholastic logic and personal abuse is, I argue, symptomatic of a new form of polemical discourse made possible by print. Indeed, one can read Marprelate as attempting to popularize syllogistic argument by investing it with humour and vitality. Thirdly, I argue that Marprelate's stance toward the 'Puritans' reveals a fundamental ambivalence. At once sympathetic toward the Presbyterian platform of reform and critical of Puritan exclusivity, Marprelate appears, somewhat paradoxically, as an advocate of popular Puritanism. The pamphlets, then, represent not an irrational abandonment of legitimate argument in favour of ridicule and sophistry, but a consistent attempt to broaden the audience for, and the participants in, the debate over the proper form of Church government in England.