A Proper Dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman ed. by Douglas H. Parker (review)

book reviews803 Uy of Love in rural Cambridgeshire emerge as neither "the meaner sort" nor a proto-bourgeoisie nor as splinter groups divorced from their parish communities . Moreover,the authors argue strongly and with a wealth ofexamples against the picture (sketched by, among others, Keith Thomas) of the rural poor as largely cut off—whether through poverty, iUiteracy, or indUference—from the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity or its radical offshoots: "there was in the seventeenth century a kind of general familiarity, in the alehouse, the cobbler's shop, the mUler's, the baker's, and many cottages, even of those exempt from taxation on grounds ofpoverty,with reUgious discussion and argument" (p. 85). A group of parishes in the ChUterns region in southern Buckinghamshire, where there had been a large number of LoUards in the 1520's and congregations of Quakers and Baptists 130 years later, serve as a limiting test case of an area with a remarkably continuous history of reUgious dissent, and thus as one focus of "microscopic study" (p. 29) for the book. In some of the most detaUed and painstaking of the local-history spadework (on the basis of surname longevity and genealogy traced from tax Usts and parish registers), Nesta Evans demonstrates both the relative geographical immobUity and the famiUal descent of nonconformists over the period; famUy, trading, and community networks as opposed to economic or social determinist explanations are aU the more critical for understanding the propagation of reUgious disssent (a conclusion recently underscored independently by Shannon McSheffrey's work on the earlier LoUards, Gender and Heresy:Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420-1530 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995]).There were indeed intimate connections between earUer and later dissenters, though (as Patrick Collinson points out) there is stUl room for debate about the nature of the connections. In his "Critical Conclusion" to the volume Collinson draws together the strands of what must be called the "Spuffordian" conclusions and notes that they are "about so much more than rural dissenters" (p. 396). He also notes that the volume has little to say about "the first (post-Reformation) dissenters," that is, Catholics (p. 392). L. R. Poos The Catholic University ofAmerica A Proper Dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman. Edited by Douglas H. Parker. (Buffalo: University ofToronto Press. 1996. Pp. ix, 291. $55.00.) This critical edition gives us a full introduction with commentary, glossary, and variants framing fifty pages of primary texts.Two sixteenth-century poems, "AnA. B. C. to the spiritualte" and a"Dialoge"between a landowner and a farmer, preface two late medieval prose tracts on the excessive wealth and power of the clergy, and the legitimacy of an English Bible. 804book reviews For the Uterary scholar, the introduction draws the helpful distinction between equivocal dialogues, such as Utopia, and univocal ones, such as Aproper dyaloge (1529, 1530) and Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe (1528) (University of Toronto Press, 1992). Having edited both works, Parker argues plausibly from stanza-form and diction that William Roye and Jerome Barlowe, ex-Franciscan Observants, composed both verse satires. For the historian, the introduction surveys anticlerical protests from MarsUius of Padua, LorenzoVaUa, and anonymous Lollards.The notes document many historical events, such as the conflict between King John and the papacy, King HenryVs persecution ofthe LoUards, and the burning ofWUUamTyndale's New Testament, the first EngUsh version made from the original Greek. The most chaUenging thesis which Parker proposes is that WUliam Tyndale edited and emended at least part of the medieval tract, A compendious olde treatyse.Vais, brief work was printed separately in 1530, included in A proper dyaloge later in 1530, and reprinted in Foxe's Book of Martyrs c. 1563. Margaret Deanesly (1920) and Curt F. Bühler (1938) have published a dUferent version taken directly from a medieval manuscript, which Parker gives in an appendix for the sake of comparison. Besides rearranging much of the medieval material, the sixteenth-century version ofA compendious olde treatyse abbreviates a series of scriptural references and omits quotations from Jerome's various biblical prologues, changes which Tyndale could have made. Parker argues, moreover, thatTyndale adds to the medieval text characteristic features: a...