Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700 (review)

Martyrdom has become a topic of sustained interest in early-modern studies; numerous recent studies attend to literary depictions of martyrdom, cross-confessional understandings of martyrdom, and the often knotty textual and historical problems attendant on early-modern martyrological texts. This essay collection adds to existing scholarship as its authors collectively study the early-modern narrowing of martyrdom’s definition to mean specifically violent deaths for religion, the various polemical and controversial conflicts in which martyrological writing participated, and the extension of martyrdom’s crown to political martyrs over the course of the seventeenth century.

In a substantive introduction, Thomas Freeman outlines ideas of martyrdom from the late-medieval period through the later seventeenth century, contextualizing the arguments of individual essays within a trajectory of developing (and controverted) ideas about martyrdom. In the subsequent essay, Freeman describes early-modern martyrdom, as depicted by Protestant and Catholic writers, as primarily an imitation of Christ’s death (and not also attainable through asceticism or contemplation); he then traces the extension of that imitatio and the martyrdom it could confer to executed political figures. Danna Piroyansky’s essay provides an important foundation for Freeman’s as it studies the many ways martyrdom was understood in late-medieval England, including mental or emotional suffering asceticism, the godly chivalry of the miles Christi, intense contemplative devotion, political martyrdom, and fiercely guarded virginity. In a provocative essay, Richard Rex argues that Richard Wyche, who early in his life professed Lollard beliefs and was later executed in 1440, did not in fact die for identifiable Lollardy but for a more generic anticlericalism or antifraternalism, and that the cult that developed after his execution suggest not support for Lollardy (which would militate against the development of a saint’s cult) but sympathy for a man wrongfully convicted. In “Saints and Martyrs in Tyndale and More,” Brad Gregory studies the Tyndale-More controversies over saints and martyrs for their doctrinal and devotional dimensions, suggesting that disputes over sanctity, devotion, and doctrine were deeply intertwined in the period even as ideas about martyrdom were largely shared cross-confessionally. In “Becket’s Bones Burnt! Cardinal Pole and the Invention and Dissemination of an Atrocity,” Thomas F. Mayer demonstrates that Pole “coordinated a campaign” to denigrate King Henry VIII’s reputation by accusing him not only of the murders of Ss. John Fisher and Thomas More but also of the particularly horrible crime of burning the bones of a saint (p. 127); as a result of Pole’s work,“a politicized martyrdom” became “an icon of the entire Henrician reformation” (p. 143).

Alec Ryrie’s essay studies the changing reputation of the reformer Robert Barnes before and after his death, arguing that Barnes’s particular beliefs (Lutheran, generally) were less important in securing his status as an important Protestant martyr than the usefulness of his death for the blackening of John Foxe’s arch-villain, Stephen Gardiner. William Wizeman discusses Marian campaigns to vilify Protestant martyrs and exalt Catholic ones by emphasizing the reasons for which they died; Marian writers thus “largely established English Protestant and Catholic historiographies until the Second World War, with their almost exclusive emphases on martyrs” (p. 167). In “Robert Persons’ Comfortable History of England,” Victor Houliston demonstrates that Persons’s Treatise of three conversions of England from paganisme to Christian religion (1603–04), the infamous antimartyrological refutation of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), was at least as concerned with pastoral as with political aims, as eager to argue for the continuity of Catholicism as to refute Foxe’s martyrological work, the primary flaws of which included, for Persons, generic and doctrinal discontinuities and inconsistencies. The final essays turn to two political martyrs. Andrew Lacey examines the development of a political cult of martyrdom around King Charles I from his defeat at Naseby in June 1645 to his execution on January 30...