Paratextual Strategies in Thieleman van Braght's Martyr's Mirror

Few texts have obtained such a central presence in the life of a people as Thieleman van Braght's work titled The Bloody Theater; or, Martyrs' Mirror of the Baptism-Minded of the Defenseless Christians, an immense compendium of stories recounting the persecution and sufferings of the Anabaptist church. Though a monument in its own right, the book's first and second editions, of 1660 and 1685 respectively, drew upon a foundation of textual inheritances consisting of earlier Anabaptist martyrologies, original prison letters, court documents, and Eusebius's fundamental Church History. But with the second edition of 1685 especially, the Martyrs' Mirror became something else entirely: a physically enlarged ingathering of editorial and illustrative contributions that sought to display more vividly than ever before a providential narrative particular to the early modern Anabaptists and their mission.

It was not simply the prolixity of the text that made the first editions of the Martyrs' Mirror so significant, however, for what occurred on the sidelines was almost more revealing of a people and a book at a particular moment in time than was the text itself. Gérard Genette has written that a book's paratext, or its title page, index, table of contents, subheadings, illustrations, and other editorial periphery, constitutes a "means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally to the public." More important, in Marie Maclean's words, is the manner by which such matter "inform[s], persuades, advises, or indeed exhorts and commands the reader."¹ In one of the most famous martyrologies, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, marginalia, indices, and other matter played a central role, for example, in buttressing and legitimizing the providential purposes of the text itself by framing, cross-referencing, commenting upon, and lending scriptural support to the fifteen-hundred-year history of the godly "remnant." Foxe and his coeditors thus used peripheral matter to connect their essentially innovative story to that of a long martyrological tradition, and to the traditions of the church as it was lived in the first centuries after Christ.

In the Martyrs' Mirror, however, paratext not only serves these functions, but also reveals another story, that of a perennially besieged community that had become visible enough to have its beliefs and traditions reflected in a physically enormous book, which, by the second edition of 1685, contained two title pages, 104 elaborate illustrations, and countless markers, subheadings, marginal glosses, and indices, as well as a series of prefaces, all sprawled across 1,364 pages, usually contained in two folio-sized volumes.² Within such abundance, authorship itself receded, to be joined, or perhaps diluted, by the contributions of the illustrator and later editors and publishers who transformed the work into what was already a profoundly collective enterprise, and one that was as much materially assertive as it was spiritually so. By focusing on such seemingly peripheral matter, one may therefore gain better understanding of not only a unique and essential early modern religious book, but one that was as much an artifact of the commercial and print culture that created it.

The Publishing Enterprise

While the Martyrs' Mirror was built on a foundation of evolving Anabaptist martyrologies that extended back over one hundred years before its first printing, the modern template for all its textual and paratextual profusion was set by the first and second editions of 1660 and 1685, each of which carried its own important distinctions. For one, van Braght's death after the first edition's release ensured that the 1685 edition would not only contain textual and paratextual material put in by subsequent contributors, but also reflect (as will be seen) the ambitions of a new and more commercially minded set of publishers who were not even Anabaptist, but rather Calvinist in orientation. Whereas van Braght (and his martyrological predecessor Hans de Ries)³ sought as devout Anabaptists to reconcile divisions in their community...