Martyrs and martyrdom have become highly fashionable subjects over the last decade. Moving beyond the limits of the partisan commentary and commemoration that dominated previous discussion of these topics, historians and literary critics are now subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated and sensitive scrutiny. Thomas Freeman and Thomas Mayer's volume brings together a distinguished band of younger and well-established scholars to explore how concepts of martyrdom evolved in late medieval and early modern England. Collectively, they demonstrate the centrality of this theme for our understanding of the English and European Reformations and the extent to which the discourse of heroic sacrifice for a religious cause was both forged and transformed in the crucible of inter-confessional conflict between the Catholic and Protestant faiths. Prefaced by two excellent and wide-ranging essays by Freeman himself, the book offers significant new insight into the impact that martyrs and martyrdom had upon early modern politics, society and culture between 1400 and 1700. Steering the subject away from a distorting preoccupation with the endeavours of John Foxe, it opens up suggestive new avenues for future enquiry.
At its heart lie two key claims: (1) that the variety of paradigms of Christian martyrdom that had been in circulation in the late middle ages came to be replaced in the post-Reformation period by a single model of violent death in defence of true doctrine; and (2) that the concept of martyrdom underwent a further transformation by the end of the seventeenth century by expanding to encompass those who died or suffered discrimination for overtly political ideals.
The first of these theses is addressed by several contributors. In her essay, Danna Piroyansky maps a variety of uses of the notion, language, and experience of martyrdom in late medieval culture, from asceticism, virginity, and enclosure to meditative contemplation of Christ's passion and stoical suffering of debilitating illness. The range of manifestations of the ‘root paradigm’ of martyrdom in this era contrasts strikingly with the model that took centre stage in the wake of the upheavals of the Reformations. Brad Gregory examines the interconnection between ideas of sanctity and doctrinal disputation in the work of Tyndale and More, which he presents as ‘a fountainhead’ for this contested concept. Stressing the extent to which the Marian church prefigured militant forms of the Continental Counter Reformation, William Wizeman extends the discussion of the dialectical interaction of martyrology and anti-martyrology into the 1550s, while Victor Houliston pursues this theme through Robert Persons's famous Treatise of three conversions published in the early years of the seventeenth century. These essays bear out Freeman's suggestion that the competing martyrological traditions that emerged in this period operated as ‘flying buttresses’ that supported a unified notion of martyrdom (p. 27).
The idealization of constancy unto death as the correct response to persecution that emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, eclipsing dissimulation and conformity, is, Freeman comments, one of the ‘unexplained mysteries’ of the Reformation (p. 19), but its consequences were profound and far-reaching. It ensured that martyrdom (the ultimate mode of imitatio Christi) was to become a focal point for the formation of religious identities and a major tool of confessional propaganda in the following decades and centuries. This is underlined by Alec Ryrie's characteristically stimulating piece on the early Lutheran preacher Robert Barnes, who, despite being left behind by the changes of theological direction within English Protestantism, retained his usefulness as a martyr to subsequent generations by providing a foil to the villainy of Stephen Gardiner. Thomas Mayer's essay on Cardinal Pole's role in the invention and dissemination of the atrocity tale, that the Henrician regime burnt Thomas Becket's bones, provides an illustration of the same process of polemical construction on the other side of the divide.
It is certainly interesting that the traditions of reverence and memorialization of those who suffered for their faith that burgeoned among both Catholics and Protestants in the post-Reformation period find little counterpart among the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Lollards. Richard Rex's essay is an ingenious attempt to explain away the anomaly of one apparent cult of Lollard sanctity, that which emerged around the London priest burnt for heresy in 1440, Richard Wyche. Dismissing alternative explanations that seem to defy the laws of logic and ‘rationality’, he argues that popular devotion to Wyche should rather be seen as a manifestation of the ‘normal functioning of Catholic devotion’ (p. 102), as a reflection of orthodox sympathy for an innocent man wrongfully convicted. For all its persuasiveness, Rex's essay is predicated upon assumptions about the nature of Lollardy that may be open to question. His unwillingness to entertain the possibility of syncretism and to envisage Wycliffism as ‘a numinous phenomenon with fluid and porous boundaries’ (p. 96) may restrict and impoverish his vision.
The second theme of the book is tackled in the remaining two essays in the collection. Andrew Lacey traces the process by which, between his defeat at the battle of Naseby in 1645 and his execution in January 1649, King Charles I was constructed as a martyr. Assimilated with the sufferings of Christ for the sins of mankind, his own tribulations at the hands of parliament and the regicides were seen as the result of the iniquities of the nation. The product of a convergence between the political theology of sacred monarchy and popular sensibilities, Charles's cult illustrates the politicization of martyrdom in the seventeenth century, and its capacity to transform the failure of a career marked by political ineptitude into a sign of heavenly victory. Finally, John Coffey offers a compelling exploration of the manner in which the memory of the death of Sir Henry Vane in 1662 shifted over the course of subsequent centuries from apocalyptic witness to whig hero. Embarrassed by the millenarian mindset of this champion of toleration, later generations reconstructed him in a secular mould as a forerunner of modern liberty. His posthumous reinvention provides further evidence of the increasing elasticity of the concept of the martyr as the period progressed.
While the broad outlines of the pattern of development posited by Freeman are probably correct, it would be a mistake to imply that before the Reformation martyrdom was an exclusively spiritual concept. As he himself points out, there was a vibrant medieval tradition of venerating political figures such as Henry VI and Simon de Montfort, and Christ's own crucifixion as a criminal further muddies the waters. It is to be hoped that the volume stimulates further consideration of these issues, along with the observation, made in passing by Freeman, that the efflorescence of martyrological writing paradoxically helped to restrain the fires of persecution (p. 32). It is also a pity that the editors were unable to incorporate more contributions on the development of this tradition in the late Stuart period, notably among the Quakers, as well as in the work of Anglican and nonconformist apologists like John Walker and Edmund Calamy. The bias of this collection towards the sixteenth century inevitably creates a skewed and partial picture.
Nevertheless, Martyrs and martyrdom deserves to be recognized as a significant intervention in debates about religious persecution and its implications in the era of the long Reformation. While the editors may exaggerate the ‘ocean of neglect’ (p. 4) from which their collection arises, Freeman, Mayer, and their collaborators have succeeded in setting several new agendas for research on this subject. They have helped to rescue martyrs from the realm of ‘spiritual misfits’ and ‘religious fanatics’ and demonstrated their potential to shed light on many critical questions that continue to exercise religious historians of early modern England.
