Petrőczi Éva: "Nagyságodnak alázatos lelki szolgája” Tanulmányok Medgyesi Pálról - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 4. (Budapest - Debrecen, 2007)

An English and a Hungarian Anti-Episcopal Dialogue from the i6th-i7th centuries

An English and a Hungarian Anti-Episcopal Dialogue from the 16th- 17th centuries

o produce a more or less correct analysis of a 16th-century English

and a 17th-century Hungarian anti-episcopal dialogue is not the

bravado of a learned and competent comparatist, but an utopistic and perhaps even childish experiment. The total risk is mine, but I couldn’t refuse this call for a pseudo-scientific, but irresistible „waltz”.

The first Dialogue being discussed here was most probably (its authorship is still unsure) written by Job Throckmorton (1545-1601). As Lawrence A. Sasek summarized his career: „He was educated at Oxford and received his B.A. also there, in 1566 he served in Parliament twice, the last time in 1587. His religious views led him to support John Penry and other radical reformers, but at a trial in 1591 Throckmorton was acquitted of complicity with them. In 1593 he denied under oath any knowledge of the authorship of the Marprelate Tracts, yet Leland H. Carlson, in Master Marprelate, Gentleman (San Marino, California, 1981, pp. 158-71) convincingly argues Throckmorton’s authorship of A Dialogue Wherein Is Plainly Laide Open, the Tyrannical Dealing of L. Bishopps Against God’s Children.

The Dialogue provides a good summary of the Marprelate attack on the bishops. Its participants, unlike most of the characters in polemical dialogues of this time, emerge as distinct personalities, and one, Jack of Both Sides (a very witty name, indeed!) even provides a dramatic reversal at the conclusion.1

Lawrence A. Sasek’s and Leland H. Carlson’s theories about Throckmorton’s being one of the possible authors of the Marprelate Tracts is sharply questioned in a very detailed and elaborated book, written by Elizabeth Appleton: „What then of John Penry, Job Throckmorton and such Puritans as Thomas Cartwright, Travers, and other Puritan scholars or writers who have been thought by some to have had a hand in Martin’s tracts? Neither John Penry, nor Job Throckmorton meets the criteria for Martin’s having been a prolific writer by 1589. Nor do they meet any of the descriptions and word sketches of Martin. That both were helpful to Mar- tin(i.e. Gabriel Harvey), that they possibly knew his identity, that they may have contributed to some of his works, that they may have assisted in protecting him from view, is likely.”1 2

1 An Introduction by Lawrence A. SASEK, in: Images of English Puritanism. A Collection of

Contemporary Sources 1589-1646, Louisiana State University Pr., Baton Rouge, 1989,41.

2 APPLETON, Elizabeth: An anatomy of the Marprelate controversy, 1588-1596, The Edwin

Mellen Press Ltd., Lampeter, Caredigion, 2001,159.

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