The Voice in the Church

This chapter shifts attention from the private reading of the Bible to its public reading in church. It explores complaints about the ‘bare reading’ of the liturgy from the 1570s, and its defence by defenders of the established church. It explores the guides that promoted rhetorical delivery, and which explained the Bible as a series of affecting stories that congregants could relate to. It recognizes that complaints about bare reading in the 1570s had a second phase in the late 1580s and 1590s when a style of oral reading as protest was launched to defend preaching by a group of puritans writing as ‘Martin Marprelate’. It explores an unusual riposte from an unexpected quarter, Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Jerusalem, arguing he set out to give readers the experience of live preaching in book-form. And it invites us to think differently about how books in this period were experienced.

Satire and Polemic

Satire and polemic were sharpened weapons in the religious wars that followed the Reformation and its aftermath, wars further enabled by print. Puns, alliterative insults, dialogues, mini-dramas, jests, epigrams, monsters, parodies, even almanacs, were all summoned to assault those whom their authors viewed as enemies to religious truth. This chapter first explores satires from the years just before Henry’s break with Rome until the Restoration, noting a shift in the 1590s as satires both improved in literary quality and became more conservative socially. The 1599 ban on printed satires stimulated the growth of satire’s baby brother, epigram; the conservatism, often directed against Nonconformists, culminated in the lofty sneer of Thomas Bancroft. Monsters were a favourite anti-Catholic theme, encouraged by the Apocalypse. The chapter closes with one major author and one major cluster: Thomas More wittily vociferating against the Reformation and Martin Marprelate igniting a bonfire of scurrilous verbal ingenuity.