Between the accession of Henry VIII and the death of Elizabeth I, just fewer than 600 English subjects were put to death as the penalty for suspicions aroused by their religious beliefs. The fact that this toll of bodies ranged from Roman Catholics, to supporters of a Protestant royal supremacy, to radical evangelicals and suspected Anabaptists discloses a confessional environment marked by flux and insecurity, where the boundaries between heresy and sound doctrine were being persistently and bewilderingly redrawn. The English state sought to impose a monopoly in affairs of faith, yet conformity of thought was almost impossible to achieve in a context where regimes were far from sure of their grip on power, when entrenched ecclesiastical authority could be blown apart by dynastic change and factional conflict, and theological certainties scattered to the winds. From the Edwardian reformers to the Marian revivalists, the guardians of orthodoxy in one decade could become the hunted dissidents, prisoners, or victims on the scaffold in the next.

The passing of the Tudors offered no respite. The return of a tidal wave of religious conflict on the continent saw the polity rendered dysfunctional by rumours of plots, claims of creeping tyranny, and fears of imminent massacres. Rival conspiracy theories shot through with the rhetoric of religious confrontation erupted into civil war and revolution, and resulted in the wresting of the throne – twice – from the hereditary line of the house of Stuart. The outcome was that the religious literature of early modern England laid bare a mood of conflict, a climate in which claims to martyrdom and persecution on one side collided with the state reflex towards coercion and prosecution on the other. Yet England saw no outright religious bloodbath, no equivalent to the massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, or the duke of Alva's Council of Blood in the Netherlands, or the displacement of thousands of refugees from France, Piedmont, and the Palatinate. Indeed, even the violently swinging pendulum of state affairs between 1520 and 1565 produced only 7 per cent of the total number of executions across Europe. A slew of recent works from authors on both sides of the Atlantic aim to probe these paradoxes further, considering questions of coercion, persecution, and martyrdom from a variety of different perspectives, and offering insight into the forces that brought England to the brink of confessional conflict – and those that brought it back. All cast new light on the choices that converged upon the church-going English layman, forced to navigate a way through an unstable world of fragile consciences, clouded political horizons, and disputed truth.

A kingdom in which the sword, the scaffold, and the court of Star Chamber regulated religious affairs did not provide an obviously fertile backdrop for the liberty of private conscience to flourish. In turn, an older historiography saw the experience of toleration in England through the prism of Enlightenment, secularization and Weberian mantras of the ‘disenchantment of the world’, in which freedom of thought rose only as the intensity of belief started to recede. It is this narrative that Alexandra Walsham sets out to challenge, offering a new framework to understand questions of persecution and accommodation in Charitable hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Walsham acknowledges that the overwhelming social and intellectual stress within the period fell upon coercion in a mental landscape where ‘truth was held to be single and indivisible’ (p. 1) and purging the contagion of heresy was viewed in equivalent terms to the amputation of a diseased limb. St Augustine's maxims reigned supreme, when the spiritual credo that ‘It is better to love with severity than to deceive with indulgence’ colluded with a political philosophy encapsulated by Bishop Sandys of London in 1571: ‘One God, one king, one faith, one profession, is fit for one monarchy and commonwealth. Division weakeneth: concord strengtheneth … a wall of defence unto this realm’ (p. 39). However, Walsham argues that formal religious discourse and state proclamations cannot alone sum up the experience of the early modern religious mind. She seeks to show religious relations in England defined instead by a cyclical state of tension, harmony, repression, and forbearance: a clash between the Augustinian mental underpinnings of a confessional state and a set of quite opposing legal, social, and intellectual tendencies on the ground. This condition arose naturally from the weakness of orthodoxy in a time of change: when individual religious affiliation was unstable and uncertain, and each educated man or woman had to fashion some sense of the truth for themselves.

Calling upon her own research as well as a wealth of material extracted from recent scholarship, Walsham starts by demonstrating that, at parish level, there were several chinks in the armour of the persecuting state. Magistrates may, officially, have been encouraged to exercise ‘holy violence’ (p. 46), but the prevailing powers were far from unanimous about exactly what goals religious persecution was seeking to achieve. As the wording of a series of state oaths came to illustrate, governments increasingly preferred to prosecute for sedition – real or imagined – rather than heresy. They persistently looked to anatomize behaviour rather than belief, and almost always viewed the use of the death penalty against a heretic as the symptom of serious pastoral failure, after the weapons of private counsel and disputation had been exhausted. Richard Hooker contended that his church authorities had no desire to ‘dive into men's consciences’; a century later, the Tory pamphleteer Roger L'Estrange insisted that he did not advocate persecution for reasons of ‘meer religion’ alone – asserting instead that the really troubling side to heterodox opinion was its seamless link with seditious action (pp. 58–9). Conversely, the case for toleration itself was far from absolute. Principled arguments in favour of religious freedom were usually the preserve of avant garde figures like William Walwyn, and liberty would be more conventionally requested or extended as short-term compromise; a means to an end to allow a minority to regroup or a government to preserve a modicum of civil peace.

This foundation allows Walsham to press the case that our understanding of tolerance and intolerance needs to be freed from the modern bias that perceives them as polar opposites – the early modern mind was far less fixed in its approach towards the question. Moreover, both the desire to persecute heretics and the willingness to extend freedom sprang from the same socio-spiritual root: the concept of ‘a charity towards the sinner that was inextricable from a fervent hatred of the sin that had endangered his or her salvation’ (p. 2). A move to curtail repression and prosecution was not an elevation of free debate, but an act of Christ-like forbearance or suffering on the part of an authority that might otherwise seek to coerce: the Douai–Rheims New Testament of 1582 declared the remission of sins wrought by the Crucifixion to be ‘the toleration of God’. The result was that the impulse towards either indulgence or persecution represented ‘a complex continuum that could flow in both directions’ (p. 231), a mood that could change in response to external events, unforeseen political pressures, and traits of personal behaviour on the part of the persecuted.

Walsham urges the historian to look beyond the gauze of polemics and pulpit rants and into the texture of English society as a whole, assessing the range of politique compromises and unspoken points of harmony that prevented a parish from dissolving into conflict. Where it perceived visible signs of deviancy or disruption, the local community could be responsible for some of the darkest acts of persecution and humiliation, but if a minority proved willing to conform to certain visible social norms, a softening counterpoise of familiarity and friendship ‘defused the power of the mythical spectres of heresy, popery and dissent’ (p. 149), keeping the preachers and the propagandists at bay. The real heralds of toleration in England would hence be figures like Shakespeare's son-in-law Dr John Hall, the Puritan physician who ministered quietly to a community divided on points of religion, or the legions of sheriffs, JPs, and deputy lieutenants who held back from investigation and prosecution, when the implementation of the state agenda was ‘filtered through the sieve of local interests and priorities’ (p. 91). Concurrently, and with varying degrees of occasional conformity, minorities could participate in preserving a fragile state of concord, whether it entailed Shropshire recusants sending their wives to be ‘churched’, the Kent Protestant John Chapman conceding that ‘he did creep to the Cross more for company than for devotion’ (p. 207) or others invoking the example of the Pharisee and secret Christian Nicodemus to admit that a man could ‘lock up his conscience’ and step into an errant service every Sunday. All of this would take place with the discreet acceptance of governments that increasingly preferred to block out the windows into the human soul. It was, as an Elizabethan commentator acknowledged, absurd to suggest that every subject in England would instantly be reformed ‘by the blowing of her majesty's trumpet at her coronation’ (p. 269). The condition of civil peace was the creation of an atmosphere where ‘dissimulation and clandestinity’ could flourish (p. 301).

This religious landscape did not represent a stable topography for the growth of individual liberties, and when one man's Nicodemus was another's wolf in sheep's clothing, the source of violent anxiety simply shifted in the seventeenth century from the recalcitrant dissident to the silent fifth column. But Walsham nonetheless allows the reader to perceive a framework for toleration based upon the existence of a more porous relationship between the church and those outside it, than invective-driven labels like ‘papist’ and ‘puritan’ would allow us to believe. As such, the book should be read in the context of works surveying the European scene by Mikulas Teich, Roy Porter, and Ole Peter Grell, revealing how the spread of religious toleration was shaped by factors political, local, and pragmatic, and thus why the philosophy was cordially detested by Enlightenment partisans like Tom Paine.Footnote ¹ To the author of The rights of man, both tolerance and intolerance ‘are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience and the other of granting it’ (p. 4).

Attitudes to toleration were, of course, not completely chronologically static, and it could be objected that the thematic structure of a book that tends to lock two centuries of early modern England into one common mental experience obscures the changes that might make an Anglican of the 1690s look upon the world in a different light to an Edwardian church reformer. However, Walsham succeeds in laying down a structure that calls into question received wisdom concerning ‘confessionalization’ and exclusivity in the early modern kingdom. Over the course of a century, the linkage between a man or woman's spiritual beliefs and their performance as a subject of the realm had been quietly and pragmatically cast into doubt, with the lived reality of an Erasmian adiaphora opening up a space between private conscience and public behaviour.

The salient voices that emerge from the study of ‘charitable hatred’ are those of a hidden continent of English opinion, a middle ground resting on religious territory free of clear definition. But such compromises were abhorred by the rival camps of zealots and partisans, who portrayed enforced conformity not simply as an affront to the true faith, but a form of self-murder, an annihilation of the pure conscience. As Jesuit scholars demanded to know, ‘what societie is there betwen light and darknes?’ (Dillon, p. 106). In recent years, a succession of studies has attempted to get closer to this perspective, reclaiming the rhetoric and imagery of English martyrdom as a subject worthy of historical study: an insight into the enactment and representation of religious conflict. Scaffold speeches, reliquary exchanges, and hagiographical production all worked to inflame the state of warfare between opinions, subverting the ceremonies of the execution to convert worldly defeat into transcendental triumph, and ensuring that every blow struck against a prisoner would be turned back against the state. The scaffold itself, far from the contrived, controlled, and constrained site described by Foucault, has been rediscovered as highly contested terrain. When Elizabethan officials moved to gag the mouths of sentenced recusants, the English public execution was confirmed as a drama with many different participants, independent actors who could tilt the performance violently and unpredictably away from the script. As Sarah Covington reminds her readers, the crowd was ‘not an audience so much as an ambiguous congregation of many faiths and confessions, standing before exhorting preachers and martyrs who battled it out for its favor’ (p. 174).

Covington's book The trail of martyrdom: persecution and resistance in sixteenth-century England aims to cover the physical and spiritual route leading a man or woman to the scaffold, from the experience of betrayal and arrest, to interrogation, imprisonment, and immortalization in literature. There is little in this work that is decisively new, with the researches of Thomas Freeman, Brad Gregory, Peter Lake, and Michael Questier offering the essential building blocks for the author's conclusions.Footnote ² Perhaps inescapably in view of its range, the book is also marred by occasional lapses into factual error – Tyndale is incorrectly listed among the victims of the English scaffold. Nonetheless, it provides a thorough and elegantly written overview, uniting the drama of public execution itself with an inquiry into the social and legal dimension undergirding it. In an area of history where the victim's testament frequently outsoars that of the executing power, Covington looks to pay proportionate attention to the varied perspectives of accusers, informers, and interrogators.

The heat of the religious battle was, in effect, generated at the trial – its capacity to rebound against the government encapsulated when Bishop Edmund Bonner felt moved to propose the shifting of events from St Paul's to a less public domain. He spoke for many inquisitors faced with the combination of teasing casuistry and lofty disdain from defendants often trained in seminaries to outmatch the prosecution, in a legal battle of wits. Would-be martyrs had to seize such opportunities against the weight of a system loaded against them. Stage by stage, Covington looks to explore the weaknesses in the judicial architecture: the gaps that created openings for a determined prisoner of conscience to find room for self-expression. In an especially effective chapter, she evokes the religious undercurrents within the Tudor gaol, where captives had to ‘navigate a multitude of relationships with authorities as well as other prisoners’ (p. 84). While the majority of prisoners duly recanted their beliefs, those who could appeal to sympathetic gaolers or state officials found the prospects more propitious. Such was the state of liberty for Catholics in Wisbech that one commentator called it ‘as dangerous as a seminary college, being in the heart and midst of England’ (p. 95). Unlikely spaces and tools helped a victim leave a testament, from Henry Walpole's wall-carvings of the orders of angels, chalked to uplift future inmates, to Thomas More's Dialogue of comfort, scratched out in part with lumps of charcoal when his pen ran dry. In sketching out the trail to the scaffold, Covington demonstrates that the execution was only the culminating stage of a lengthy battle to define the legacy of each martyr: a series of moral and institutional challenges, with each willing the other to crack under force of physical or rhetorical assault. It was a process that suited prosecutors and defendants alike, with the Catholic priest John Bradford affirming the words of St Cyprian: ‘When the wind doth not blow, then cannot a man know the wheat from the chaff’ (p. 101).

Aiming perhaps for breadth over depth, The trail of martyrdom does not probe beneath the surface to explore the ideology that went into fashioning narratives of martyrdom, nor the competing religious traditions behind it. Outward experiences, rather than inward attitudes tend to dominate, and the book's general tone is more descriptive than analytical. However, taking these limitations into an account, it sits well as an introduction to the theme, and can be read alongside a collection of more searching recent studies covering different aspects to martyrdom, religious mentalities, and the battle for the early modern public sphere. Anne Dillon's The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community represents the most original and attractive of these, not least in its deft interweaving of visual, as well as written evidence. As she reveals, the libraries of early modern Catholic households groaned with texts of saints and martyrs, gathered from printing presses and private manuscript circulation. ‘Holy history’ offered a vital method of self-affirmation for the English Catholic community: a literature of stimulus and consolation centred on exemplary tales, memoirs, anecdotes and eye-witness accounts, written to show the hand of God in the most excruciating moments of horror and suffering. With the production of this genre in mind, Cardinal William Allen wrote to the rector of the English College, Rome, wryly suggesting that Campion on the scaffold was far more effective than Campion in disputation. Interest in recusant martyrology has amplified in the last decade, thanks in part to the influence of Alison Shell's Catholicism, controversy and the English literary imagination, 1558–1660 (1999). However, with sources more fragmentary and dispersed, English Catholic meditations on the theme of death, sacrifice, and conscience have still received far less coverage than the testaments of their Protestant rivals, leaving Dillon with an enticing range of untapped material to consider.

In exposing a cacophony of different voices, Dillon argues that the Catholic martyr of post-Reformation England was less an icon of baroque aesthetics than a sober model of the humanist intellect, his or her reputation shaped by Tridentine imperative to serve as ‘a glasse and mirror, a light and lanterne, a paterne and example to youth, to age, to lerned, to unlerned, to religious and to the laytie of al sort’ (p. 92). It was not the heroic sacrifice itself that mattered, but the truth of the cause to which it was put, and most hagiographers preferred to accentuate the victim's reasoned understanding of their fate than the extremity of their courage, or the assemblage of dreams, miracles, and other histrionics of popular piety that converged upon the stake. This purified pattern of veneration was built upon another formative influence – a vitriolic literary exchange with Protestant authors over the way to distinguish an authentic holy witness from a self-glorifying impostor at the stake. As one Protestant minister put it: ‘In the tyme of Queen Marie were many put to death, and now also in [Elizabeth's] tyme, of two severall opinions: both these cannot bee martyrs' (Brietz Monta, p. 1). The ensuing ‘pseudo-martyr’ debate, running through the works of John Bale, John Foxe, Robert Persons, and Nicholas Harpsfield, leant strength to the vision of a world split uncompromisingly between true and false churches. But, according to Dillon, it ironically pared down the differences between the representations of rival religious icons, when Protestants and Catholics agreed fundamentally on the Christological pattern of a true martyr, and on the reasons why a false one was a threat to the church, the state, and the moral order. The legacy of this battle was a rich vein of symbiotic literature, as authors sought to recapture the historical as well as confessional territory, and opposing claims to martyrdom sketched out competing calendars and alternative visions of the English past. The Catholic picture of martyrs pointing to the truth of a papal, universal order had to confront the reformers' gallery of Celtic and Lollard icons, whose salvation showed England clasped to the hand of the hidden, true church, rendered as the woman clothed in the sun from the Book of Revelations.

The construction of English Catholic identity was no straightforward process, and Dillon reveals how texts and images of martyrdom were made to perform for different politico-religious agendas. In England, martyrology had to mediate between the earthly, conservative realm of provincial recusancy, and the eschatological drama to which Catholics contributed in their decision not to conform. The narrative produced for St Margaret Clitherowe by her confessor John Mush was shot through with homespun, domestic images of her prosperous, mutually supportive York community – Catholic, Protestant, and church-papist – to show that the shadow of the scaffold might fall on the life of every recusant, no matter how secure their world. Politically, these martyr texts could still possess a certain irenic import, falling into line with the Jesuit Robert Southwell's insistence that the victim went to death for reasons of religion alone, and had no treasonable wish to disturb the state, dislodge the monarch, or compel others to adopt the true faith. Projected across the frontiers of Catholic Europe, the narrative of martyrdom would appear in a very different form. To Cardinal Allen: ‘if al the world could see with their eyes, as we doe feele; al the Princes Christian would take compassion, and accompt our complaints most just and necessary’ (p. 81). To safeguard political and financial support for recusants, European Catholics must be made to see themselves as potential martyrs in waiting. In one of the most evocative passages in the book, Dillon shows how Richard Verstegan's woodcuts and engravings, produced in 1580s Antwerp, propelled the images of recusant martyrs out of their shires and market towns into a disconcertingly French, urban setting, depicting bourgeois families threatened by armed men, who battered down doors, ransacked, and overran private houses. This call to arms – a rejoinder to Protestant lamentations on St Bartholomew's Day – characterized a continuous flow of polemical thought, which took varied and mutable artistic forms.

Dillon's work unearths the pipelines transmitting documentation, news, and ideas through a transnational recusant community. In the construction of a unifying idea, to captivate individuals and societies on both sides of the sea, she concludes, the English Catholic community constructed itself. The construction of martyrdom is unlikely to be the closing verdict on this issue. It could be complained that Dillon needs to offer greater recognition of the debates through which English Catholics approached their Janus-faced identity, the struggles of Jesuits and Appellant-loyalists that exposed the conflict between tenacious patriotic sentiment and the ambitions stimulated in Counter-Reformation Europe. John Mush, hagiographer for Margaret Clitherowe, came to define himself almost as strongly in his writings as a secular clergyman acting against the Society of Jesus, as a Catholic taking on the Elizabethan state. The image of recusant martyrdom was perhaps more capricious and conflicting than the author here acknowledges. However, this is a minor concern against a book that should act fruitfully as a stimulus to further scholarship. In showing how the ties that bound the English Catholic community were as much imaginative and rhetorical as social and physical, Dillon recasts recusants effectively as a participatory, rather than a pariah, group in the religious debates of the English kingdom. The literary energy of the recusant communion belied a precarious minority position.

If martyrdom threatened to subvert state control, it could also loosen the social moorings of duty, deference, and domesticity. Megan L. Hickerson's new study of Making women martyrs in Tudor England considers the surprising frequency with which early modern Protestant hagiographies depicted religious disharmony at the heart of private families, and celebrated a form of militantly independent female action, even as they were notionally promoting a godly, patriarchal order in the household. Her book aims to challenge the weight of an existing historiography by problematizing the notion of sixteenth-century reforming discourse as somehow inherently reductive towards women. In reality, she claims, the needs of the religious campaign in Tudor England meant that Protestant radicals had to mobilize every receptive individual, and set them in a posture suited for free moral choice, embracing the prospect of rebellion and disobedience if necessary. This trend threatened, in a variety of ways, to thwart ‘the gendered ideology of Calvinism’ (p. 158).

It was certainly a commonplace in early modern literature to present the narrative of confessional struggle through female imagery – John Foxe's play Christus triumphans (1556) was typical of the trend, with its heroine Ecclesia symbolizing a true church in Hickerson's words ‘invisible, wandering, weak and persecuted, virtuous and female’ (p. 33). This image conferred a typology in which Foxe might address the forty-eight female martyrs to be found in the Actes and monuments. However, Making women martyrs argues that the works of Bale and Foxe exceeded the conventional feminine paradigm, promoting a cast of characters who embodied not so much the exemplar of virtuous ‘strength in weakness’, but were unashamedly ‘disobedient, opinionated, articulate, aggressive and/or immodest’ (p. 7). Steering a nuanced argument through detailed investigation of the key texts, Hickerson acknowledges that Protestant authors did venerate the marital status over the solitary or celibate life (which they viewed with deep suspicion) but argues that the marriage they so admired was primarily a spiritual one – the woman's status as a bride of Christ, which should always hold the ascendancy over obedience to her husband in the earthly estate. The language that surrounded Foxean women going to the stake was disarmingly erotic, with victims adorned in white garments as a bride ‘garnysshed’ for her spouse: kissing the stake, as the hallmarks of spiritual election (p. 32). This mystical turn set the tone for an array of sixteenth-century heroines, whose portrayal did little to offset the allegations that the martyrologists were endorsing socially disruptive conduct. Accordingly, Anne Askew, put to death under Henry VIII for her evangelical opinions, sought divorce from her conservative, church-going spouse and angrily rejected her married name as a symbol of corruption and oppression. Far from covering up this potential embarrassment, John Bale acclaimed her reaction against ‘that uncomelye kynde of coacted marrryage, by thys doctryne of S. Paul 1 Cor. 7. If a faytfull woman have an unbelieving husband, whyche wyll not tarrye with her, she may leave hym’ (p. 63). Concurrently, Askew's conduct anticipates the stance taken by ‘Prest's wife of Cornwall’, as captured in the Actes and monuments: ‘I have learned such thinges, as are so fixed in my breast, that death shall not separate them.’ Thus inspired: ‘I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband: from the fellowship of Aungels to mortall children’ (pp. 100–1). This subversive mood did not go unnoticed in the cut and thrust of contemporary religious debate. In the mocking verdict of Robert Persons, ‘John Foxe delighteth every where in the malepart aunswers of his yonge maydens … this was the spirit of ghospellinge systers in those days’ (p. 97).

Hickerson argues that the delineation of Askew, Prest, and their contemporaries reflected a politico-religious divide as much as a source of social tension in the ideology of England's reformers. She fixes the actions of Foxe's and Bale's women in the context of two competing Anglo-Protestant visions of the world: the increasingly settled characterization of Elizabethan England as a collective Elect – an obedient family idyll – at odds with the developing Puritan vision of the saved few as a persecuted church within a church, frustrated by the existing spiritual and cultural bonds. The deeper conflict was not so much over the status of women in itself, but between the allegiances levied by a Protestant kingdom and the growing sense of the true church as a mystical communion, unfettered by worldly form, with God's Elect freely scattered across the different nations. Foxe himself was gradually drawn closer to the radical terrain, and the 1570 edition of the Actes and monuments contained whispers of a political challenge, dedicated suggestively to the ‘true and faithful congregation’ (p. 142). The afterglow of this text inspired a host of seventeenth-century Puritan women, dissenters, and prophets: building up libraries, reading the bible, listening to godly sermons, and worshipping in secret assemblies outside the boundaries of accustomed domestic space. Interpretations of Bale and Foxe would allow future nonconformists – social, political, and religious – to appropriate the narrative of dawning English Protestantism to their own ends.

Recognition of the larger religious context equips Hickerson's eloquent, quietly revisionist work to highlight the hidden undertones in Tudor Protestantism. The thesis undoubtedly requires some qualification. Foxe was not free of misogynistic touches himself, nor did he eschew praise for the quietist condition – marital or virginal – in female lives. It is perhaps more accurate to suggest that Making women martyrs dramatizes a particular moment in the history of the English Protestant communion – but a moment that nonetheless collapsed within a generation. As Hickerson concedes, seventeenth-century interpretations and abridgements of the Actes and monuments had already started the trend that would turn such robust, acerbic Foxean ‘constructions’ like Lady Jane Grey into meek, domesticated exemplars, more conformable with a visible church and a worldly order. Furthermore, the accounts of strong and strident female icons were hardly unique to the English Protestant confession – as admirers of Margaret Clitherowe might attest – but perhaps reflected a tendency latent to all forms of martyrology in a time of conflict. The status of religious women perfectly encapsulated an unstable climate, when the promotion of peace and obedience in one's own communion was never completely removed from a spirit of disruption and partisanship in the kingdom at large; to be rekindled should times of oppression return.

It will remain a point of contention as to whether hagiographers distinctively shaped – or simply reflected – the mood of political and religious discourse within the early modern realm. Tudor martyrology was just one of many stark expressions of an England that saw itself at the limits of the settled, confessional world, a kingdom steeped in awareness of the environment of controversy and the battle between two opposing churches. Concurrently, Susannah Brietz Monta's persuasive discussion of Martyrdom and literature in early modern England explores the way in which disputed claims to saintliness spanned out beyond the conventional forms of hagiography, leaving traces on a greater body of texts, and haunting the commanding heights of contemporary literature. She turns, principally, to this higher canon of works. From the dreamlike horizons of The faerie queen, she suggests that the travails of Spenser's Redcrosse Knight offer a meditation on the qualities required of a real saint, suffering and questing in a broken religious landscape. Through the ventures of this Protestantized St George, the poet could explore how to be a ‘Legend of Holiness’ (p. 81) and come within reach of the truth, when all previous, Catholic incarnations of the Christian Knight appeared sunk and discredited. Themes of anguished chivalry returned in a Catholic riposte: Anthony Copley's hymn to recusant patriotism though the pages of A fig for fortune (1596), with a knight-hero contemplating the opposing possibilities of exile, submission, and violent resistance. Through the drama of this personal struggle, Copley offered his co-religionists a more internalized conception of martyrdom, defined as a quiet and stoical adherence to conscience, against the mutability of worldly things. The endurance of worldly torment with courage could reconcile Catholic sensibilities to the demands of public allegiance to the realm, but would also, he promised, open the gates of ‘Sionrie’ and permit a glimpse of the New Jerusalem (p. 101). Yet literary flourishes could not, in the end, dictate political fortune. Copley's world collapsed in 1603, with his arrest for complicity in the Bye Plot against James I, and he died a fugitive pilgrim in Jerusalem, defeated by the ‘uneasy compromise between spiritualized apocalyptic struggle and the suffering passivity loyal English Catholics had to endure in the political world’ (p. 111).

Other authors wrestled with ‘the throes of an often painful love relationship with the divine’ (p. 119). John Donne, a man who, as Brietz Monta comments, had rejected the chance to cling to a Catholic conscience, searched for alternative forms of agonistic struggle and personal redemption. ‘Wee are not sent into this world, to Suffer but to Doe, and to performe the Office of societie’, he contended, admonishing those zealots in thrall to a fatally deluding ‘corruption and Ambition of being Lord of our selves’ (p. 137). But martyrdom would continue to grip the English imagination, Brietz Monta argues, because the idea perfectly expressed ‘the early modern dynamics of spiritual pain and consolation, the poles between which contemporary religious lyric ranged and from which it took its spiritual bearings’ (p. 150). The vision rose again after 1618 as the Thirty Years War returned the Catholic enemy, and restored the notion of a battle between true and false churches. Dekker and Massinger's play The virgin martyr (1620) appropriated traditionally Catholic motifs in order to mount an attack on James I's frailty as a defender of Protestant interests in the Palatinate. From the opposite perspective, recusant pamphleteers saw priests and lay leaders suffering death at the hands of the parliamentary authority after 1641, and made recourse to martyrology to cross the bridge from religious to political engagement. In the writings of Ambrose Corbie and Richard Mason, the priest-victims of England's troubles die simultaneously as members of the true church and as patriots loyal to the throne, with Catholicism made the precondition for lasting peace and a secure crown. Puritan strikes against the king of England were made the inexorable consequence of successive Protestant assaults on the altars of ‘the King of Kings’ (p. 222).

Brietz Monta's assertion that early modern martyrology possessed a unity ‘not neatly divisible by religious tradition’ is in danger of stretching claims to commonality too far. Martyrdom for Catholics remained a primarily salvific experience – a personal participation in Christ's Passion – while reformed Protestants saw it in a subtly different light, as the means by which God winnowed and purified his Elect. The difference between persistent Catholic acceptance of miracles and the Protestant search for signs of visible providence was still theologically rock-solid, and, as such, the vision of martyrdom, as it would occur to Spenser or Dekker, could not be neatly equivalent to the ideal behind the writings of Southwell and Copley. Nonetheless, and in spite of occasional lapses into a diffuse prose style, Martyrdom and literature presents a cogent case for seeing hagiography not in devotional isolation, but as the catalyst for a greater range of early modern scholarly activity. The availability of conflicting confessions and testimonies offered individuals sundry examples of the language with which to confront the English state and its laws. The authors of the age were at once troubled and exhilarated by this experience.

Arthur Marotti's discussion of Religious ideology and cultural fantasy similarly looks to incorporate images of sainthood and suffering into a wider study of the imaginative stances stimulated by religious conflict. The literature of martyrdom, he argues, should be seen within a larger canon of ‘cultural codes and ideological fantasies’, drawn from and including conversion narratives, confessional histories, plot allegations, and poetic testimonies of faith. Through five self-contained but complementary essays, he sets out to explore the tenor of ‘religious and political language and myth-making’ (p. 1), concentrating on how the pattern of confessional debate was configured by a variety of external concerns: ranging from questions of foreign policy, to the relationship between king and parliament, and a febrile sense of national identity.

Marotti's book centres on a description of the scholarly processes that drove English nationhood apart from ‘the internationalist assumptions of Catholicism’ (p. 132), and left the Catholic community itself increasingly alien and outré. His opening chapters illustrate the way in which a confessionalized recusant community was built up, its flock nourished through manuscript transmission of martyrdom texts, and intimate devotional relationships between lay women and the ‘ghostly fathers’ – their confessors – that gifted malicious Protestants an armoury of invective against the faith. Converts especially sought to widen the gap between the religious communities and enhance the sense of Catholic separation. In an especially rich and insightful chapter, Marotti shows how figures entering the Catholic communion captured their journey as the liberation of the individual will from the cultural and intellectual constraints of the world in which they had been raised. William Alabaster's fevered experience of ‘such flames of ardent love towards Christ … to be partaker of his cross … such contempt of all the world and all that is in it’ (p. 104) worked in harmony with Tobie Mathew's voracious appetite for Italian aesthetics to deliver a very complete ‘alienation from Protestant Englishness’ (p. 105).

For a recusant community with a disproportionate representation in the literary and aristocratic elites, the intellectual battle-lines were drawn up against ‘the historiographical project of English Protestantism’ (p. 132), the narrative of salvation from recurrent Catholic plots, perils, and providential challenges. In 1690, as the threat of Jacobite resistance rose, the immediate recourse of the Whig polemicist Edward Gee was to remind his readers of the menacing strains of Robert Person's Memorial for the reformation of England, claiming that a copy of the work had been presented to James II at St Germain. At the heart of this rhetoric, as Marotti illustrates in detail, was the lurid, psycho-sexual demonization of that national villain, the Society of Jesus, in a literary form that combined all the most nightmarish and prurient touches of fairy-tale fantasy (pp. 56–7). Politically, Jesuits would threaten to turn the world upside down, as Machiavellians, imperialists, and absolutists for the pope. Morally, they appeared as pagans, rapists, wolves in the wood, cloaked in the disguise of angels and apparitions in their attempts to possess the English body and soul. From the writings of Andrew Marvell to the fictions of Titus Oates, these motifs would cut deep enough into public discourse to redirect the currents of the constitutional mainstream. The Popish Plot allegations of 1678 represented the perfect example of a fantastic literary ‘romance’ that burst out from the text, with violent consequences, into real human lives. Across the Stuart kingdoms, the construction of an outlandish hidden foe supplied the energy behind debates over the country's erratic foreign policy, the shape of party conflict, and the workings of the Tyburn scaffold.

An original assemblage of material and an impressive ability to show the connections between different realms of literary production renders Marotti's work a fluent introduction to the fears, dreams, and uncertainties that helped to forge national and religious identities in early modern England. The only region of doubt concerns not the coherence of his argument but the extent to which the tendencies described really represented the sum of early modern English attitudes: whether the assorted labels of conflict and loathing truly characterized the national self-consciousness. ‘English nationalism rests on a foundation of anti-Catholicism’, Marotti contends (p. 9), but even in his own work it is possible to glean trends that ran against this pathology of hatred and exclusion. The most elevated Catholic poets could find a cross-confessional readership for their works, while at the time of the Popish Plot, the defences marshalled by the Jesuit John Warner were closely pegged to the Tory political arguments of Roger L'Estrange, appealing to an Englishness of constitutional stability, social order, and monarchic loyalty. To add to the confusion, the ‘popery’ card was raised as vehemently by Protestant radicals against a certain ‘throne and altar’ tendency within Anglican ecclesiology, while its supporting genre of anti-Jesuit polemic was drawn at least in part from intramural tensions within the Catholic communion. The prevailing impression by the end of the book is of a national identity that, far from settling into a complacent anti-Catholic hue, was becoming increasingly fraught and contested, when notions of the correct relationship between church, crown, and constitution tore in many different directions.

Marotti's dissection of early modern Englishness follows the fashionable idea of nationhood as a constructed concept, arising in part from the need to engender hostile awareness of a threatening ‘other’. However, in the scholarship of the last ten years, this phenomenon has been shown as far less clear-cut. The arguments in Religious ideology and cultural fantasy duly demand engagement with the works of Steven Pincus, Tony Claydon, and Ian McBride: considerations of the rival strands of insularity and cosmopolitanism, and even the shadow of self-doubt that cut across English Protestant nationhood.Footnote ³ From Elizabeth I to William III, a fluctuating relationship with the Protestant Church Militant represented only one part of a succession of attempts to define the body of the realm, drawing upon law, mythology, custom, and the tenets of the constitution. By contrast, the most strident champions of the faith increasingly recovered the rhetoric of international Christendom in solidarity with European Protestant congregations, a confessional loyalty that could undermine, as much as it might shape, settled loyalties within a kingdom. The desire to convert England into the pristine Protestant communion offered potent politics, but a far from clear and uncontested stance, and those who did not share the ideal need be no less animated in their sense of national feeling.

Many of the questions that spring from the pages of Religious ideology and cultural fantasy – alongside the works by Dillon and Brietz Monta – concern the position of the English Catholic community in relation to the early modern kingdom. Texts of martyrdom and heroism, as Marotti recognizes, were received not just in the Manichean mindset of converts, but by a larger community that was overwhelmingly peaceful, prosperous, and patriotic in its public assertions, and whose lives revealed acute tension between the high universalism of the Tridentine vision, and the gathering English sense of being part of the ‘church, not the court of Rome’. Michael Questier's magisterial study of Catholicism and community in early modern England offers the most substantive new initiative to strip English recusancy of its alien ‘otherness’. Through a focus on ‘politics, aristocratic patronage and religion’, he looks to overthrow not just the Whiggish archetype of the faith as something beyond the pale of the kingdom, but the idea that Catholic endurance owed largely to plebeian and then gentry conservatism: a base slowly attenuated through theological ignorance, and retreating behind ivy-clad manorial walls. Questier's principal concern is the depiction of the English Catholic community in its relationship with the outside world, and in confronting this question, he argues that the public meaning of the early modern faith lay not in the catacomb culture of concealed chapels, subtle insinuations in wills or other hidden trappings of ‘a world we have lost’ but in political calculations, the formation of kinship networks, and the fluctuations in domestic and foreign affairs at the heart of the Elizabethan and early Stuart courts. In making this case, it is the book's most striking conclusion that there was a certain substance behind the Protestant claim that the recusant community was starting ‘to entertain vaulting political ambitions which threatened the settlement of religion in the Church of England’ (p. 387).

The immediate subject of the work is the web of lay and clerical patronage that entwined around the households of the Browne family, the viscounts Montagu, in their enclaves in Sussex and London, building up a nexus that criss-crossed the country, and assimilated a variety of recusant opinions. The patrician kinship network, Questier asserts, was the basic unit of Catholic life, the arena in which families of a seemingly church-papist or even fully conformist disposition developed an affinity with a more uncompromising variant of the faith, and acquired the protective shield of contacts in high places. As the leaders of one such entourage, the Brownes were unlikely adversaries to the kingdom's Reformation. Dissolved monastic lands had helped to build up their wealth, expanding estates gave them much to lose, and the paintings on display at Cowdray Park proudly depicted the 1544 landing of Henry VIII at Calais, the sovereign's marriage to Anne of Cleves, and the coronation of Edward VI – events at which the family took a prominent part. But, even before their ennoblement under Mary, the Brownes were consolidating a dynastic base that united groupings at court, in Sussex, and in Ireland, whose mood was tinctured by hostility towards the religious change. In turn, the first viscount and his allies started to push for a daring pro-Spanish agenda in parliament and the privy council into the first decade of the Elizabethan reign.

The accession of Elizabeth forced the family to sustain a dangerous political balance, with each heir compelled to find new ways to defend the private conscience, and fix it in a stable relationship with their public profile. The first viscount threw up a façade of public conformity and forged a presence at court uneasily married to tacit recognition of his real faith. He could call upon his Spanish and imperialist connections to undertake royal diplomatic service, and endeavours such as the attempted match between Elizabeth and the Austrian archduke could temporarily reconcile Montague's Catholic conscience with the regime's desire to strike a blow at France and Mary Stuart. But the spectre of prison and punishment loomed recurrently over Montague's world, from the moment when he opposed the 1559 supremacy act in the House of Lords. His family circle protected Marian priests and his blood connections brought him close to the Ridolfi and Throckmorton conspirators. Beneath the image of moderation, his parliamentary rhetoric disclosed a set of veiled, ambivalent, and conflicting attitudes towards the Elizabethan government. When the queen was confronted on her venture to Cowdray in 1591 with a visible demonstration of local military power, rumours swirled around London that Elizabeth's sojourn there put her in grave danger.

Seen in this light, the loyalist posture of the house of Montague was by no means a symptom of quietist obedience or withdrawal, and the heightening of politico-spiritual pressures set the second viscount on a trajectory to reject James I's oath of allegiance, finally unmasking the family's true colours in a bid for the leadership of ‘our Catholique commonwealth’ (p. 353). Questier traces the path taken by this generation of the family against the background of the simmering conflicts inside the Catholic community, from the Jacobean clash of loyalist Appellants pushing for an acceptable oath against Jesuit opposition, to the ‘Approbation controversy’ – Bishop Richard Smith's ill-fated attempt to establish a full episcopal order in England in the reign of Charles I. As the most constant lay proponent of the Appellant and later the Approbationist cause, Montague allowed his household to become a vehicle for those who wished to reform and regularize the clerical mission, rebuilding an institutional church with its own rules and procedures, to set Catholicism on a public footing within the realm. However, Questier asserts that there were more than matters of ecclesiology at stake. Such seemingly narrow jurisdictional disputes were actually shaped by a series of political engagements between the crown and the Catholic community, as the Montagues leant their voice to a rising campaign for toleration and enhanced influence over the English state. As the Appellant mission reflected growing expectation of gains to be reaped from the son of Mary Stuart, so the Approbationist project cast light on Catholic ambition stimulated first by the abortive ‘Spanish match’ and then by the dynastic union with Henrietta Maria. A visible church, governed to some degree by royal authority, would be one part of a project to lever recusant peers towards court, into the new queen's entourage, and from there even into the highest echelons of English government.

From one perspective, these affairs laid bare the international context to English Catholicism – the Approbationist party had to create an axis of support that extended from London to Paris and Rome. If Montague was Smith's most important patron in England, then the peer's coeval across the channel was Cardinal Richlieu. But the rhetoric of ecclesiastical controversy also closely mirrored conflicts of discipline, patronage, and governance that raged simultaneously within the Church of England. In their claim to speak for a pro-episcopal, loyalist constituency, Montague and his acolytes crafted a language of ‘No Bishop, no King’, that shadowed both the Gallican, politique thought influenced by the jurists of the Sorbonne, and the tenets of a Bancroftian, anti-Calvinist movement within the Stuart polity. Smith's and Montague's attacks on Jesuit opponents struck self-conscious parallels with Bancroft's and later Laud's critique of a Puritan camp lacerated for its disruptive influence within the church and allegedly republican claims over the state. In the upshot, Smith's project floundered on the rock of papal displeasure, and Montague died, disappointed and unrepentant, in 1629. But their efforts revealed a climate of opinion in which Catholics could find space and sympathy close to the Stuart throne, exploiting the faultlines of a ‘politically schizophrenic’ (p. 383) culture split between different conceptions of English Protestant identity. It is against this background that we should reassess the emergence of the loyalists and Appellants party, not as the heralds of a bland, politically neutered form of Catholicism, but as propagandists for an ambitious strategy in the public domain: equally dangerous, in the eyes of some Protestant observers, as the machinations of the Jesuits.

Written with wit and verve, Questier's study paves the way for a thorough re-examination of the recusant community of late Tudor and early Stuart England. Catholicism and community pledges to overthrow the dusty narrative of recusant decline, exposing new ‘routes for the expression and dissemination of Catholic ideas and aspirations’, when the challenge to a contested Protestant state was not just confined to ‘the weird world of the spies, professional intelligencers and plotters whose activities have traditionally filled the pages of histories of post-Reformation English Catholicism’ (p. 66). Stocked with new information and insights prised out of the fragmented sources, this densely packed narrative will not always be easy to follow for those unacquainted with the elementary details of early modern Catholic life. It serves essentially as the start of a reinterpretation, when the southern and courtly focus of the work must be developed by studies of the emergent northern and East Anglian dynasties. But Questier demonstrates successfully that a process of ‘recapturing the Catholic community’ (p. 15) puts the scholar on a rich scholarly terrain – and an area whose relative neglect starts to look somewhat injudicious.

One of Bishop Smith's most intransigent opponents in the Approbation controversy was a man whose life and career initially offered many parallels with the Montagues of Cowdray. Sir George Calvert, 1st Lord Baltimore, was similarly new to recusant ranks, as an erstwhile conformist and secretary of state to James I, who had staked his public reputation on the success of the Spanish match. The experience of political defeat, Catholic conversion, and loss of office was a career trajectory hardly uncommon for statesmen close to the Stuart throne, but Calvert's response to his travails was original. As the founding proprietor of the colony of Maryland, he initiated a precarious sixty-year experiment, establishing the first arc of English territory to be implanted on a principle of religious toleration, where a Catholic might govern a population of different denominations, and temporal obligations asked few questions of a subject's private faith. The endeavours of Calvert, his son, and their successors find lively expression in John D. Krugler's book, English and catholic: the Lords Baltimore in the seventeenth century: the first thorough assessment of a project that deals a robust challenge to what the author calls ‘the Catholic as victim’ view of early modern British politics.

In rejecting the temptations of devotional solace and retreat, Calvert acted on the premise that the strictures of parliamentary penal legislation did not extend across the king's overseas dominions. Vilified after the failure of the Spanish match, he looked to revive his reputation through a project of commercial and imperial expansion, promoted ‘in the service of our owne King and State’ (p. 140). Religious liberty was, as Krugler concedes, the ‘modus operandi’ but not the purpose of Maryland's foundation – ‘it was a means to an end, which was the creation of a prosperous society’ (p. 154). But the material self-interest of the proprietors grew logically into ideological principle, imposed and sustained in the legislation of the polity. The second Lord Baltimore enshrined his family's philosophy in his Act concerning religion of 1649: ‘By Concord and Union a small Collony may growe into a great and renouned Nation, whereas by Experience it is found, that by discord and Dissention Great and glorious kingdomes and Common Wealthes decline and come to nothing’ (p. 133). In using the same law to strike out the use of words such as ‘heretic’, ‘schismatic’, ‘idolater’, ‘papist’, or any other term employed ‘in a reproachful manner relating to matter of religion’ (p. 181), he fulfilled a desire felt recurrently by rulers such as Henry VIII, who had privately lamented the verbal currency of vitriol driving his kingdom into division (Walsham, p. 128). The Calverts had formalized by executive fiat the alternative conventions that policed English parish life, when visible observance of certain unifying standards could – just – cover up the troubling undercurrent of disunity in matters of faith.

The ‘Maryland Designe’ faced persistent dangers from within and from without, when the animosity of the neighbouring Virginians was galvanized by the Civil War and the overthrow of Stuart royal authority, and parliamentary petitions helped to wrest the colony from its Catholic authorities in 1654. Against the currents of the decade, Baltimore survived, taking his case directly to Cromwell to reclaim his rights as the best man to guard a North Atlantic empire against foreign incursion. The 1660 Restoration brought a chance of further renaissance for the Calverts, and the new political condition raised hyperbolic hopes among Catholic admirers who hailed ‘the Miracle of this Age’, where different religious factions ‘concur in a unanimous parallel of friendship, and inseparable love intayled unto one another’ (p. 223). By 1667, Lord Baltimore was planning to immortalize his vision in the architecture of St Mary's, envisaging a baroque cityscape in the wilderness, inspired by the church designs he had observed in the time of his son's education at Lisbon.

Krugler darts energetically amongst the contemporary material to reconstruct the challenges of the colonizing process, pinpointing the significance of Maryland as a counterblast to the dominant political trends across the Stuart kingdoms. A slight, but nonetheless exasperating weakness lies in the glut of anachronisms peppering the prose of the book. Too often the Maryland design is characterized by the teleology of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘secularization’, when in fact Calvert's method and motivation represented quite the opposite of these Whiggish pieties. This shortcoming to the book would, feasibly, have been corrected by a better integration of Calvert's initiative into the environment of Stuart domestic and imperial policy. Maryland, Catholic and tolerant, could play a pivotal role in helping the court to strike at the radical Protestant fortress in North America. The colonies could foster a form of government by direct rule that flew in the face of entrenched parliamentary and religious interests at home, and potentially sapped the strength of the Stuarts' political critics at Westminster. It was no coincidence that the essential steps towards securing the Maryland charter were taken by crypto-Catholic courtiers such as Sir Francis Windebank in the circle of Henrietta Maria, with a momentum built up by the personal rule of Charles I. Likewise, the final downfall of the experiment in 1688–9, when the Protestant Associators toppled the Calvert coalition, was drawn from the same political dynamic that produced the deposition of James II. The third Lord Baltimore's assailants appeared not from the obvious source of opposition – Puritan Virginia – but a conservative Anglican backlash provoked by clergymen who saw in Maryland a vast conspiracy to set Protestant against Protestant, a scheme to advance the will of Rome. The Revolution settlement imposed Anglican prerogatives and therefore reduced rather than extended the individual's chance to attain liberty of conscience in the Baltimore territories.

Insuperable opposites as they might seem, the instincts towards martyrdom and accommodation, persecution and indulgence represented parallel attempts to fill the vacant space in the English religious imagination, in a way that might ultimately point to civil peace. The motivating force that would bring a government into conflict with religious zealots was not altogether dissimilar from that which would turn a figure of seemingly autocratic disposition – James II, Oliver Cromwell, or Sir George Calvert – into a proponent of widened religious toleration. A yearning for national tranquillity cut as deep as the inclination to conflict in early modern discourse, a search – made evident in the words of many humanist-informed martyrs themselves – for a future where acts of wild heroism, suffering, and self-sacrifice need no longer be called upon. The dream of unity attained through uniformity was not an idea to be readily abandoned, and the starker elements of religious activity were as animated at the tail end of the early modern period as they had been at the accession of Henry VIII. From the Sacheverell agitation to the ‘Jew Bill’ disturbances and the Gordon Riots, the following century bore witness to an experience of religious freedom based on distinctly flimsy foundations. Indeed, after 1689, as Alexandra Walsham shows, many of the greatest pressures towards exclusion emerged most strongly from within dissenting communities, reacting against what Bunyan dubbed ‘a delicate Plain, called Ease’ (Walsham, p. 314) with the production of histories, chronicles, and ‘Books of suffering’ that offered internal reinvention of the narrative of suffering and persecution. But in the upshot, the drama of martyrdom, the reassurance of coercion, and all the invectives, caricatures, and partisan labels through which men and women looked to define their world had failed to provide the glue to bind a divided polity. It was only after this failure had been repeatedly and overwhelmingly put on display that their hold on the English imagination would begin to slip.