The Martin Marprelate Controversy - Joseph Black (essay date fall 1997)
Joseph Black (essay date fall 1997)
SOURCE: Black, Joseph. “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England.” Sixteenth Century Journal 28, no. 3 (fall 1997): 707-25.
[In the following essay, Black explores the negative reaction resulting from the breach of religious and political norms by the Marprelate tracts.]
On November 15, 1588, the antiquary Francis Thynne wrote Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister, to lobby for a position in the College of Arms. His letter is ostentatiously allusive, a rhetorical display designed to prove himself fit for office. Unfortunately for Thynne, the theme he is best able to embroider is that of bad luck and missed opportunity: “Your Lordship may suppose,” he begins, “that I have muche idle tyme and litle wisdome, to write so often & spede so seldome.”1 Thynne had “knockt to late” to be...
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