This book analyzes the attempts by Tudor governments to cope with religious dissidents by putting them to death and the responses of those on the path to martyrdom to these efforts at their suppression. In England this occurred in a context complicated by the fluidity of the definition of heresy and the frequent conflation of heresy with treason. According to Sarah Covington, the attempts made to control religious dissidence in sixteenth-century England were episodic as they waxed and waned with the intensity of the perceived threat of religious nonconformity to the stability of Tudor regimes; attempts at such control and responses to them were also powerfully symbolic as competing theaters of state force and dissident religious conviction. The author is particularly interested in what she describes as the “processes and rituals which led up to martyrdom's final denouement” (22).

After a first brief chapter on “Contextualizing Persecution, Conceptualizing the Martyr,” there follow four substantial chapters that describe the processes of informing on and arresting religious dissidents, the experience of prison, “Interrogations and Trials,” and finally the killing of these resisters to prevailing orthodoxy. Covington establishes a number of important points as she develops these aspects of persecution: Tudor persecutions were characterized by a respect for the law that may have prevented the more random religious violence of other places, such as France; the wishes of the central government and the follow-up of local authorities were often uncoordinated and sometimes in opposition to each other; rapid religious change could be confusing to local officials and the populace; sixteenth-century imprisonment was both markedly cruel and amazingly porous; letters from the imprisoned were powerful instruments for reinforcing religious commitments; trials could backfire on the interrogators; and, because of the impression made by the bravery and last words of those martyred, their executions often proved to be Pyrrhic victories for the persecutors. The author further notes that whether in prison, on trial, or at the place of execution, the martyrs, whether Catholic or Protestant, seemed to follow “the same script” (180), drawing on a common language and collection of metaphors from the Bible and early Christian narrative. Perhaps none of these conclusions is surprising, but they are well-documented and convincingly presented, so that Covington's book is an important addition to the literature on its subject as well as remarkably evenhanded.

Treating its story as a unity, Protestant, Catholic, and sectarian, The Trail of Martyrdom makes a contribution to what can be designated a phenomenology of martyrdom, similar to Brad Gregory's Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999), to which Covington makes reference, although her book, limited to England, is more narrowly focused. Covington also provides details on many matters related to persecution and martyrdom, such as which local officials had responsibility for various aspects of the process of persecution, or who had to meet the costs of imprisonments and executions, which are not usually covered in treatments of the subject.

Although not everything can be included in a brief book, perhaps more attention might have been given to the sectarian martyrs of the Elizabethan reign. The three separatist martyrs, Henry Barrowe, John Greenwood, and John Penry, are not mentioned, and Robert Browne, who is mentioned as a “Congregationalist” martyr (75), was not one: he conformed to the Elizabethan Church, renounced separatism, and died in prison in 1631 after he had assaulted a constable in relation to a case concerning debt.

There is also an error in treating William Tyndale, who was not returned to England for martyrdom (61) but went to the stake on the continent near Brussels. And I wonder about the author's description of the martyrologist John Foxe: is there any reason for singling him out from other martyrologists as “biased” (73) insofar as accounts of martyrdom from the time were generally efforts at propaganda on behalf of a cause—one might raise questions about the accuracy of many accounts of martyrs, but their biases are understandable in their context. Sometimes it was friends and associates whose martyrdoms they described.

This is a well-written and insightful study of a disturbing subject. Covington notes that Foxe, by the fourth edition of his Acts and Monuments, seems to have rejected religious persecution altogether, regarding it as a mark of false religion (8–9); the modern reader, recoiling at the cruelty of persecution (though also amazed by the endurance of the martyrs), might wish there had been more who came to reject persecution.