Studies of martrydom in early modern England have benefitted from a number of intersecting currents in the last twenty years, including a religious turn in historical studies; a related emphasis on the persistence of English Catholicism through the sixteenth century; a growing interdisciplinarity between literature and history, with particular focus on the construction of collective identities; and investigations into print history and editorial practices, most notably with regard to John Foxe's Acts and monuments. It is surprising, then, that no study has been devoted solely to providing a broader history of the Catholic and Protestant martyrology in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, even though the genre has been examined in terms of literary production, or placed in a broader comparative framework alongside continental works. Essay collections have been helpful, but they cannot carry the sustained coherence and depth that only monographs can provide. Alice Dailey's The English martyr is therefore to be welcomed, particularly for scholars and students who seek to understand the evolution of the martyrology, and by extension martyrdom, over the course of two transformative centuries in England's history.

Extending her purview from late medieval martyrological writings through to Charles i's (ghost-written) book of meditations, Eikon basilike, Dailey seeks to observe ‘the continuities and ruptures in representational habits that arise when an old genre encounters the new challenges of radical historical change’ (p. 6). For Dailey, the transformations of the early modern English martyrology had less to do with confessional identities and strategies than with the ‘specific rhetorical and historical circumstances of discursive production’. In other words, if one understands the martyrology as a genre in which suprahistorical typology intersects with the historical contingencies of suffering and death in a particular time and place, then political, social and legal developments become a determinative – and sometimes problematic – force in the ongoing textual construction of those who die for the faith.

Dailey's early chapters explore medieval forerunners such as the (non-English) Golden legend of Jacobus de Voragine, with its bold-talking heroes and its ‘hierarchy of martyr experiences’ (p. 19), through to the later persecutory dramas of the Corpus Christi passion plays centred on a silent and bodily abject Jesus. Dailey then proceeds to demonstrate the manner in which the motifs of these earlier works reappeared in Foxe's Acts and monuments, even as the great Protestant martyrologist ostensibly sought to distance himself from all such papist inheritances. Neglecting a significant body of Foxe scholarship over the last ten years, Dailey tends to overstate critics' insistence on his historicism, as she upholds the medieval and miraculous ‘generic residue’ in his work; overlooked as well are Foxe's own critics, such as Nicholas Harpsfield, who engaged with the martyrologist and his ever-morphing text in significant ways.

The most important chapters of Dailey's book, however, centre not on generic continuity but on discontinuity and even ‘representational crisis’ (p. 135), specifically in the martyrological writings composed around Catholics facing trial for treason in the reign of Elizabeth. As Dailey puts it, in a martyrology the victim must ‘fit the conventions [of the genre] if he or she is to be interpreted or reproduced as a martyr’ (p. 100); but trials for treason – as opposed to heresy – ‘disrupt this paradigm’, undermining the argument for martyrdom and rendering the martyrology problematic, to say the least. Dailey thus examines numerous tracts which attempt to situate martyrs within a paradigm of religion rather than politics; particularly effective are Dailey's discussions of martyrologists who attempted to free Edmund Campion, Margaret Clitherow and Edmund Gennings from the secularised persecution of a treason charge. The ‘deceitfull artes’ are also examined in works by Robert Persons and others, who ‘de-emphasize the moral gravity of equivocation’ in their justification of unmartyrological acts of secrecy, duplicity, hiding and disguise that they and all recusants relied upon for survival (pp. 195, 196). Finally, Dailey ends with a chapter examining the Eikon basilike, as it re-locates the martyrological drama from a social space to a subjective realm located in the conscience of a Davidic yet also domesticated king – all of which is rejected by Milton in his Eikonolastes, which insists upon martyrdom as a visible and historical event.

Dailey surveys an impressive range of texts while offering deep and insightful readings throughout; appendices also will make this book useful in the classroom. Some weaknesses are evident, however. More attention could have been paid to early Christian martyrs, who were tried on the imprecise foundations of the Roman law; Polycarp, for example, was not charged with any crime, which his own martyrologist turned into evidence of the world's lawlessness. Returning to Foxe, Dailey also implies that his Protestant martyrs presented themselves as passive and silent, in the manner of the Corpus Christi Christ, when in fact they were a temperamentally diverse group, with not a few bold-speaking individuals among them. Finally, it is important to remember that Jesuits such as Robert Southwell did not wish to be martyrs, but missionisers; only when their task in this world was foreclosed did they yield to the inevitable – knowing that while their heavenly reward was secured, their posthumous status as martyrs in the fallen world was, perhaps, something else altogether.