Introduction
Dorcas, Lady Martin (née Eccleston) was a stationer who surreptitiously distributed radical puritan literature. She also produced a translation from the French of a catechism, An Instruction for Christians, which was licensed for publication on 24 January 1580/1 (and printed, though no exemplum is known) and reprinted in Thomas Bentley's anthology The Monument of Matrones (London, 1582). No manuscripts of her work are recorded.
For printed and manuscript records relating to her life, see Micheline White, ‘A Biographical Sketch of Dorcas Martin: Elizabethan Translator, Stationer, and Godly Matron’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 30 (1999), 775-92.
Peter Beal