Pasquill’s “Lives of the Saints” and Thomas Nashe’s <italic>Almond for a Parrat</italic> (1590)

The “Lives of the Saints” is a never-published work promised by the pseudonymous “Pasquill” in his contributions to the print campaign to combat the influence of the Puritan Martin Marprelate tracts (1588–89). While it began as a polemical fiction, the “Lives of the Saints” evidently did exist in the form of a working compilation of unflattering anecdotes illustrative of Puritan hypocrisy and absurdity. This article argues that these notes were incorporated into <italic>Almond for a Parrat</italic> (1590), and that their appearance in this pamphlet was necessitated by a shift in the target of the anti-Martinist campaign away from attacks on Puritans generally and toward one named reformer, John Penry. Furthermore, the article suggests that “Pasquill” and the author of <italic>Almond for a Parrat</italic> are the same person, Thomas Nashe, and that reading <italic>Almond for a Parrat</italic> as a pastiche that evolved in the process of composition not only helps date the writing of the pamphlet but also explains a structural miscellaneity unusual even among the corpus of anti-Martinist polemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]