The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution by Alice Dailey (review)

Alice Dailey’s The English Martyr: from Reformation to Revolution makes a persuasive case for the value of the new formalist trend in literary studies. Indeed, her introduction explicitly makes this case, both in general and for her purposes specifically. Expanding upon an insight by Daniel Boyarin, which she eloquently rephrases as “martyrdom is not a death but a story that gets written about a death” (2), Dailey argues that exploring the genre and formal qualities of English martyr narratives from their medieval roots through the execution of Charles I reveals how literary form shapes and is shaped by specific “political, legal, and religious developments” (6). Dailey especially wants to complicate any simple notion that the Reformation changed the genre: she posits instead that “generic shifts have less to do with confessional identity than with the specific rhetorical and historical circumstances of discursive production” (6). The rest of Dailey’s book offers chapter-length readings of particular martyr stories with attention to the interaction between their formal qualities and the contexts in which they were written.

In chapter 1, “Medieval Models: The Golden Legend and the Corpus Christi Passion Plays,” Dailey identifies generic conventions that make any English narrative legible as a martyr narrative. From the tales of The Golden Legend, Dailey extracts three major traits: the martyr’s cheerful attitude toward and miraculous ability to transcend bodily agony (12–28); the martyr’s verbal confession(s) of faith (28–32); and the persecutor’s irrationality, sadism, and ultimate damnation (32–6). In the later Corpus Christi plays, Dailey identifies a related but not identical set of conventions for the foundational Christian martyr narrative, Christ’s Passion, where Christ’s striking silences in the drama serve to emphasize his unique sacrificial role (while contrasting with the verbose martyrs of The Golden Legend) (42–52). Christ’s persecutors, according to Dailey, are also more anchored in the playworlds’ history and politics than their raving Golden Legend equivalents, allowing their motivations to be legible if not admirable (36–42).

Having laid out these basic qualities of medieval martyr narratives, Dailey turns to early modern uses and adaptations of the genre in chapter 2, “New Actors in an Old Drama: The Martyrology of John Foxe.” Foxe’s lengthy sixteenth-century compilation of tales of Protestant martyrs—Acts and Monuments—opens with a preface that distances the work from the “empty inventions” of The Golden Legend, which, Dailey argues, has given scholars an excuse to ignore continuities in form between the Catholic Legend and Foxe’s Protestant project (54–5). In her chapter, Dailey examines how Foxe’s stories—and, apparently, even some of the historical events they portray—rely heavily on the form of older martyr legends even while their content is drawn from relatively recent events, a procedure that transforms Protestant sufferers into legible martyrs, not un-Christian heretics (as they were labeled at their trials and executions). By interpreting recent history through the traditional conventions of miraculous endurance of torturous execution, verbal witness, and raging persecutors, “one of Foxe’s most important contributions to the genre of martyrology [is] the simultaneous representation of the martyr as a specific human being and as an archetypal soldier and sufferer for Christ” (68). Dailey is sensibly careful, however, to stress that this making of martyrs isn’t a purely “inauthentic” process of “conscious, strategic, and political self-fashioning” (62)—it isn’t just calculated spin. Calling instead upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the “body of accumulated structures that operate beneath conscious agency to inform human behavior,” (61), Dailey argues that victims who behave like martyrs, and writers who interpret their behavior for martyr narratives, do not fit easily on either side of a binary of “strict performativity” versus “original expression” (63). Instead, they are communicating in a deeply embedded martyrological discourse that is, in a way, part of their native English tongue.

Until this point, the book is a cogent if not necessarily groundbreaking discussion of...