PRELUDE TO THE MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY
[UDALL, John, attributed?]
A dialogue, concerning the strife of our Churche: wherein are aunswered divers of those uniust accusations, wherewith the godly preachers and professors of the gospell, are falsly charged …
London, Robert Waldegrave, 1584.
Small 8vo, pp. [16], 136, with the signed blank A1; woodcut headpiece and device to title-page; headlines trimmed in the preliminaries, else a very good copy in nineteenth-century calf.
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A dialogue, concerning the strife of our Churche: wherein are aunswered divers of those uniust accusations, wherewith the godly preachers and professors of the gospell, are falsly charged …
First edition of a lively dialogue set in an inn, between four characters: Philedonos, the innkeeper, Orthodoxos, a puritan cleric, Philodoxos, a lawyer, and Philochrematos, a bishop’s chaplain. The preface ‘To the Reader’ makes clear the anti-clerical and anti-Catholic intent of the work, but the conversation form allows voice to other positions.
Philedonos opens proceedings with the lament that his livelihood is suffering – ‘I have known when a dozen or sixteene Gentlemen and wealthie yeomen have met together, and made merrie foure or five daies, or a weeke, at cards or Bowls’, but now ‘all good fellowship is laide aside’, which he blames on ‘new-fangled Preachers’ that ‘marre all’ by being too ‘precise’. Orthodoxos accuses him of vicious carnality, comparing such gatherings – a mix of ‘rich men’, ‘unthriftes, even the scum & dregs of the people’ – to a ‘little hell’, while Philodoxos argues questions of legality over morality, and Philochrematos blames everything on ‘Puritans and Precisians’, who create schism over ‘toyes and trifles’. The lawkeeper and innkeeper then stand aside while the two theologians trade blows, arguments designed to expose the chaplain’s hypocrisy and the puritan’s authenticity.
The work appeared anonymously but has been attributed variously to Dudley Fenner (c. 1558–1587), whose works ‘rank among the best expositions of the principles of puritanism’ (Encyclopedia Britannica 1911), and John Udall (1560?–1592), a friend of the puritan printer Robert Waldegrave, with whom he would collaborate on the series of surreptitiously printed attacks on bishops known as the Marprelate tracts from 1588.
ESTC S109629; STC 6801; this is the variant with the catchword ‘God?’ on K3r.
