Marprelate and its Mildy Mocking Alternatives

• In Event: Printing Joyful Culture in Renaissance France and England

Abstract

In Elizabethan religious discourse, humour is often seen as having a polemical and divisive function. Indeed, if pamphlets are among the most prominent literary forms in which humour is employed to make religious points, the Marprelate pamphlet war, between the pseudonymous radical advocate of Presbyterianism Martin Marprelate and the Church of England establishment, was the period’s best known and most satirically aggressive approach to religious politics. In this paper I will explore a set of simultaneously published comical pamphlets that strike a surprisingly ecumenical tone on religion and confessional difference, including Tarlton’s Newes Out of Purgatory (1590) and the complex question of its later editions. I will argue that in playing with codes of fiction and authorship, these words echo the language of the tracts and offer a more peaceful and mocking response to the polemical politico-religious satire of its day.

Author

• Lieke Stelling, Utrecht University