If martyrs present a problematic spectacle of human behavior, then female martyrs are doubly cursed, as they violate traditional codes and expectations appropriate to their gender. In the case of early modern England, the manner in which protestant martyrologists treat such figures as Anne Askew has therefore received an intensity of attention, particularly in recent years; while such a figure is upheld as a model of Christlike suffering, her sometimes confrontational defiance also resists contemporary notions of what a woman, and a godly woman, was to be. But as Megan L. Hickerson puts it in Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England, questions of gender and the use of feminine imagery also inform martyrologists’ larger concerns with “good and evil, true and false, elect and reprobate, spiritual and carnal”; gender in this sense does not simply influence “a formative early modern discourse,” but so does it “define an emerging English Protestant identity” (9).

Building upon the proliferation of recent articles by Tom Freeman, Susan Wabuda, Susannah Brietz Monta, and others, Hickerson studies gender primarily through the texts of John Bale and John Foxe, writer-editors who created the paradigm for the godly protestant martyr, and with it, the true church he or she represented. In a chapter devoted principally to Bale and his highly influential Image of both churches (1550), Hickerson describes the manner in which older notions of the two churches—the true church of Christ and the false one of Antichrist—were reconfigured by Bale into explicitly gendered terms: thus was the false church defined above all by its deformed embrace of clerical celibacy, which in its “inversion of holy marriage” and “of virtuous womanhood” was actually bound by Antichrist and the “disorderly whore” that ruled within (23, 25). By contrast, the true church, in accordance with the book of Revelation, is established in its female identity as “as a meek, suffering woman without a home, rejecting the world, longing for union with Christ, `her almightye spouse’” (26). Borrowing Bale's gendered dichotomy, Foxe in his play Christus Triumphus (1556) would depict the allegorical character of Ecclesia as the true church in the form of “a good wife, virtuous and long-suffering in fidelity to her husband,” while Pornapolis, her opposite, is a “disordered, predatory, lustful woman … absolutely identified with Catholicism and its veiled sexuality, a sexuality that destroys marriage, and thus, order, and thus society” (40).

In subsequent chapters, Hickerson also uses her study of the gendered two churches—the “lechery of Rome” and the “fidelity of Ecclesia”—to understand Foxe's particular construction of female martyrdom and to argue against prevailing views on the subject. Anne Askew, most notably, remains a fraught character, in her recantation, her separation from her husband, her verbosity, and, above all, in terms of the female hagiographic tradition, her absence of virginity. Yet for Bale, who was the first to edit her examinations, Askew achieves greatness in the realm of Ecclesia with her “maydenhede of the soule” intact and her erudition transformed into a badge of triumph (72). For Foxe, Askew also presents a potentially troublesome model for martyrdom; where recent scholars have asserted that Foxe in his Acts and Monuments approached and depicted his female martyrs differently, however, Hickerson argues that the use of words such as “silly” or “simple” are not relegated by Foxe to women alone, nor is the Eusebian “strength-in-weakness” paradigm solely applicable to them either, especially when male martyrs of lesser social standing or knowledge are also represented in such a light.

The Catholic polemicists Robert Parsons, Miles Huggarde, and Nicholas Harpsfield took up the denunciations against protestant female martyrs, though Foxe, Hickerson argues, “attempted to undermine or deflect future criticism by showing their persecutors revealing, to their detriment, their misogynistic assumptions about women's learning and erudition, making them appear ridiculous” (88). Such is the case with a Mrs. Prest, a theologically astute martyr whose additionally problematic qualities—for example, her leaving her husband—are instead upheld as reflective of a woman who “[renounced] her husband for Christe's sake” (117–18). Martyrdom in fact represents spiritual marriage to Christ, with duty to that husband superseding all earthly concerns; yet women alone did not partake in these nuptials, as male martyrs also emerged as “brides of Christ” with their “wedding garments” and their symbolic kissing of the stake. Maintaining fidelity to the Christ-husband, however, often involved disobeying earthly dictates—as Askew, Prest, and others did—but even here, while Foxe was no theorist of resistance along the lines of a John Ponet, his advocacy of a kind of marital or political resistance was embraced at times “with relish,” his women martyrs upheld as models not of virtue but of righteous disobedience articulated on the part of a true church defined by its persecution (142, 161).

Though Hickerson convincingly argues against previous characteristics of Foxe (and Bale) as a misogynist, her correction threatens at times to simplify the martyrologist, implying, for example, that Foxe's feminization of the two churches or his presentation of a figure such as Askew somehow render him more palatably (and perhaps anachronistically) woman friendly than he may have actually been. At times, Hickerson also adds relatively little to the current and fast-growing scholarship on Foxe and women, though she incorporates the historiography effectively and has produced a work that has built upon and benefited from it. Certainly a measure of admirable disobedience could be found in Mrs. Prest's statement that if the choice were between her husband and her savior, “I am content to sticke onely to Christ my spirituall Husband, and to forsake the other” (168); in upholding such women—and arguing that Foxe upheld them too—Hickerson, like her martyrologists, does honor to them, in all their troublesome rebellions.