A Proper Dyaloge Betwene a Gentillman and an Husbandman

Ron Cooley is an associate professor of English at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Douglas Parker’s edition of A Proper Dyaloge Betwene a Gentillman and
an Husbandman makes available, for the first time in a modern critical
edition, a remarkable and neglected example of early English Reformation
polemic. In the process, it offers fascinating insights into the
complexities of authorship and of textual circulation in early modern
literary culture, and into the interpenetration of ecclesiastical
politics and broader social issues in 16th-century England.

The book is a sort of textual snowball, a three-part composite
published anonymously in 1530 in Antwerp (a version containing only the
first two parts had been published in 1529). Part 1 is a verse dialogue
between a gentleman and a husbandman, attacking clerical possessions.
Part 2 is a 14th-century Lollard prose tract condemning clerical
property and clerical appointments to secular offices. Part 3 is another
Lollard prose document reworked by a 16th-century editor (perhaps
William Tyndale), arguing for a vernacular Bible. The first Lollard
tract is incorporated into (and even interrupted by) the verse dialogue,
while the second is merely appended.

Parker makes a persuasive (if not entirely conclusive) case for
attributing authorship of A Proper Dyaloge to Jerome Barlowe and William
Roye, authors of the slightly earlier and more-well-known verse polemic
against Cardinal Wolsey, Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe. (Indeed, the
present volume is a sort of companion piece to Parker’s 1992 edition
of Rede Me.) Parker’s edition of A Proper Dyaloge represents a more
ambitious critical project than its predecessor: it contains a
substantial bibliography and about 100 pages of closely and judiciously
argued introduction. These resources permit readers to situate the text
in the “swirl of ... contemporary critical views circulating about the
traditional church” and provide a solid foundation for research. This
is not a groundbreaking book, but it is a valuable one. The editor and
the press are to be commended for producing what will surely be a
standard scholarly resource for decades to come.