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Reviews 247 Parker, Douglas H., ed., A Proper Dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1996; cloth; pp. ix, 291. R.R.P. US$55.00. A Proper Dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman (1529?) was published anonymously at a time when a wave of reformist works was placing unprecedented pressures on the Cathotic Church in England. Its sustained attack on clerical wealth and possessions, and i t s populist manner, link it to a tradition of religious and social complaint which drew inspiration from Lollardy and gathered its o w n momentum through the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. Such texts exploited the potential of the printed word to encourage English men and w o m e n to envisage n e w ecclesiastical and social structures. The Dyaloge is a hybrid text, made up of an original verse dialogue, part of a fourteenth-century Lollard tract, and a second prose piece arguing for the Bible in the vernacular probably written in the early fifteenth century. Douglas H. Parker publishes the full text of the second edition of 1530. H e attributes the dialogue section to Jerome Barlowe and William Roye, authors of another Henrician text Parker has edited, Rede Me and Be nott Wrothe (1528), a scurrilous poetic attack on Cardinal Wolsey. More importantly, he links WiUiam Tyndale to the text, as the likely editor of the short tract on the translation of the Bible. After the Husbandman and Gentleman have raised their central criticisms, focusing on the Church's accumulation of land and power by exploiting fears of purgatory, the Husbandman proposes they seek redress. H e suggests that they both travel to London where the Reformation Parliament is in session, and there 'The constraynte of oure myserye to declare/Under a meke forme of lamentacion'. This constructs the classic paradigm of complaint: the powerless representatives of the commons appeal to a central authority for redress of widespread corruption in the commonwealth. But things are rarely so straightforward, as the Gentleman reminds his interlocutor by aUuding to the government's hostile response to Simon Fish's A Supplication for the Beggers (1529). As with Fish's text, which Parker proposes as a principal source for the Dyaloge, 248 Reviews complaint will typically combine an overt expression of powerlessness and orthodoxy with an underlying popular appeal for radical reform. The authors situate their text within a national heritage of similarly radical social criticism and religious dissent. The establishment claim that there was no chaUenge to the Church before Luther is dismissed as 'a starcke lye', and the LoUard tract is introduced in support. 'For though old writinges apere to be rude', comments the Gentleman, they often 'include/The pithe of a matter most fructuously'. Moreover, the text revises understandings of English history, in a manner that presages the Elizabethan concern with nationhood. Perhaps most interestingly, Henry V, one of the great heroes of Elizabethan narratives of national identity, is attacked for persecuting religious reformers. His wars were promoted by the clergy to distract his attention from their o w n 'froward tyranny', and brought only 'endles sorowe to oure nacion'. 'This', concludes the Husbandman, suggesting the processes through which history is shaped by those in positions of authority, 'is nowe a dayes clene oute of mynde'. The Lollard tract in many respects makes the agenda of the Henrician reformers look timid. While the contemporary dialogue traces the nation's woes to the clerical involvement in property, the Lollard author challenges the very concept of landowning as he outlines the Bibtical authority for communism, a spectre which senior Protestants in the succeeding decades would work hard to dispel from their movement. But despite some differences on social and economic issues, the Lollards and their Henrician successors were crucially united in their belief that the Bible should be made available in the vernacular. The final prose tract in this book, which either the authors or an editor clumsily tacked onto the existing text, traces the project of translation in England back to Bede, and proffers the vernacular scriptures as a keystone of national identity. A s the law was given to Moses...

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