Martyrdom “is not a death but a story that gets written about a death” (2). Since St. Stephen, Christians have recognized a variety of individuals as martyrs and circulated their stories as evidence of divine presence and to provide inspiration for believers. To be labeled a martyr, a person's death and story must conform to a set of commonly accepted characteristics, which constitute a kind of script. What happens, Dailey asks, when historical developments prevent a martyrological account from following expected patterns? Reformation England provided just such a case study. Dailey identifies the century from the Marian persecutions of Protestants in the 1550s through the execution of Charles I in 1649 as a period of profound fracturing and renegotiation of martyrdom and martyrology. Scripts had to be changed. By the mid-seventeenth century with the sacralization of Charles I's death, martyrs and martyrologies had transformed into abstractions, “religious metaphor[s], for non-religious conflict,” a pattern Dailey maintains exists to this day (245).

Medieval Christians understood what made a martyr, informed by Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend and English Corpus Christi cycles. These works provided two models of the martyr: the belligerent, provocative, vocal witnesses who defied irrational persecutors, and Christ's example of silent, suffering martyrdom. In this cross-confessional analysis, Dailey examines accounts of Protestant deaths from Foxe's Acts and Monuments, Catholic executions from the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and Charles I's “martyrdom” as key moments in the evolution of the topoi of martyrology. I wonder why Dailey did not begin her analysis with the Henrician martyrs, weaving Thomas More and others into this story. Regardless, Dailey presents Foxe as successfully blending medieval, Catholic understandings of martyrdom with immediate historical events of to produce recognizable Protestant martyrs. The Catholics did not do nearly as well. Under Mary I, authorities prosecuted Protestants as heretics. Elizabeth I, however, prosecuted Catholics as traitors. By redefining English Catholics as secular criminals rather than religious transgressors, the government effectively limited English Catholics' ability to be viewed as martyrs. “The construction of martyrdom is made possible only through strict narrative repetition,” Dailey contends (100). There was no belligerent witnessing. Persecutors were no longer corrupt pagans. They were the very sovereign and government to which English Catholics owed their allegiance. Martyrs were not seen exhibiting traditional martyrological language, performance, and prayers. Catholic deaths no longer fit an easily recognizable script of holy death and witness.

English Catholics thus found themselves caught in a “transitional moment.” (219). Dailey explores strategies martyrs used to mend the fracture within martyrological discourse, from Edmund Campion to Margaret Clitheroe to Henry Garnet. Catholics refused to be tried; they split martyrological discourse into two branches—polemical and devotional; and they practiced equivocation. She also analyzes apologetic and polemical debates engaged in by both Catholic and Protestant writers such as William Allen, William Cecil, Robert Persons, and Henry Mason. Ultimately, she concludes Catholics failed to place their dead within recognizable patterns of martyrdom.

By 1649, Dailey argues, understandings of martyrdom had fractured. Perhaps a better descriptor might be “evolved,” since Dailey clearly recognizes adaptations are occurring. In her final chapter, Dailey contrasts Charles I's Eikon Basilike (1649) with John Milton's response, Eikonoklastes (1649). Charles portrayed himself as a new, different kind of martyr. He adopted certain characteristics of traditional martyrdom, such as victimhood and imitatio Christi, but redefined many others. Ultimately, Charles defended monarchy and condemned regicide. He never upheld a faith. Conflicts between authorities and potential martyrs had been primarily religious all the way through Foxe. With English Catholics, they blended political and religious elements. In his martyrdom, Charles argued that his individual conscience was under attack, rather than the church. Yet martyrdom must be visible and identifiable to audiences. “How can this text produce a legible document of martyrdom?” Dailey asks (226). Milton agreed, though Charles's death eventually became sacralized in the minds of many English subjects.

This work is well written, well argued, and generally persuasive. Dailey situates herself within historical work on early modern European and English martyrs by Brad Gregory and Anne Dillon. She adopts a similar framework as Thomas S. Freeman's and Thomas F. Mayer's edited collection of essays, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700 (Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell, 2007), which explores the evolution of martyrs and martyrdom from a broad range of late-medieval models from both Catholic and Protestant camps. Theoretically, she employs insights from Bourdieu (habitus) and Foucault (the scaffold as a site at which power is contested). She encourages scholars to blend insights from the New Historicism with renewed attention to literary form. Martyrologies do not merely provide transparent histories of specific deaths. They are part of a dialogue between events and literary form that shapes the behaviors of prospective martyrs as well as audience expectations. Martyrdom only works when a martyr's story is recognized and validated.

My primary criticism of Dailey's analysis is a seeming insistence on the inflexibility of the topoi of martyrdom, especially in the chapters on English Catholics. As she notes, “the uniform, typologically consistent set of transcendent martyr figures we find in earlier martyrology are succeeded by a roll call of diverse and problematic individuals” in Reformation era England (205–206). But by setting her medieval benchmark as The Golden Legend, Dailey ignores much of the malleability of martyrology over the first 1,200 years of Christianity. Voragine's ninety-three martyrs appear “typologically consistent” (205–206) precisely because they have had hundreds of years to be debated and refined. Dailey admits in her last chapter that rigidity goes hand in hand with subtle adaptation over time, but this recognition comes too late, after rigidity has been used as the dominant analytical framework in the bulk of other chapters. Regardless, martyrdom and martyrology face the perpetual challenge of trying to fit diverse and problematic individuals into coherent patterns of behavior and meaning, and Dailey provides valuable insights into how England met this challenge.