Nuancing the notion of confessional martyrologies operating in dialogue

Protestant and Catholic martyrologies in England rarely used an extensive language of martyrs’ blood simultaneously.Footnote ²⁴ The era of anti-Catholic martyrological polemic in England dates from the late 1520s, when martyrdom began to be employed as an apologetic weapon in English Protestant writings, to John Foxe’s Eicasmi SevMeditationes in Sacrum Apocalypsin (1587).Footnote ²⁵ Such works were filled with references to martyrs’ blood. English anti-Protestant martyrological polemic began with Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort (1534) and continued into the eighteenth century; however, frequent references to martyrs’ blood entered this genre in only the late 1570s in letters and diaries, and appeared in widely-read works and in print only in the 1580s.Footnote ²⁶ Protestant and Catholic constructions of martyrs’ blood were less part of a conversation than something closer to a Protestant monologue, which petered out as the Catholic monologue was beginning. Thus, the very idea of these confessional martyrologies operating ‘in dialogue’ needs to be considered with caution.

English Protestant and Catholic constructions of martyrdom during much of the sixteenth century differed also in their imagery and tone. From the beginning, depictions of martyrdom in Protestant confessional polemic tended to be vivid, highly emotive, and often focused as much on the martyrs’ persecutors as the martyrs themselves, seeking to inflame anti-Catholic sentiments. The genre was preoccupied also with notions of the body, as Protestantism sought to redefine what was holy, natural, and sinful, with regards to the body and bodily appetites. In contrast, Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort set a different tone to which Catholic martyrological writings of the next forty years mostly conformed, scarcely referring to martyrs’ blood, focusing more on the martyrs’ godly life than their wicked enemies. A chief weapon of Catholic confessional polemic, beginning with More, was the ‘pseudo-martyr’ debate, which sought to identify the true and false Churches by identifying true and false martyrs.Footnote ²⁷ Thus, the spotlight in Catholic martyrology of the 1530s–70s fell squarely on the martyrs themselves, who were revealed to be true martyrs because they were holy, educated men, dying for correct doctrine. A rhetoric of bloodthirsty enemies was inconsequential within this framework: true and false martyrs alike could have bloodthirsty enemies, but false martyrs could not be pious, erudite men, dying for religious truth. This Catholic focus was also largely non-corporeal, since the argument hinged on true martyrs’ erudition and adherence to orthodoxy; thus, martyrs’ blood was rarely mentioned.

Even when the treatment of blood in Catholic martyrologies became more similar to that in Protestant martyrologies, there is no evidence that this was a deliberate or direct response. Scholars have fruitfully highlighted the ways in which Protestant and Catholic martyrologies spoke directly to each other; however, the ways in which they did not engage in dialogue are also significant. Very rarely did either side comment on, let alone analyse, each other’s use of a rhetoric of martyrs’ blood, despite its prominence.Footnote ²⁸ Therefore, the mere presence of this theme in both Protestant and Catholic martyrologies does not demonstrate that these works were engaged in close conversation; indeed, the late entry of martyrs’ blood into English Catholic martyrological polemic, half a century after its first appearance in English Protestant writings, perhaps suggests the opposite.

The emergence of blood as a theme in English Catholic martyrology rather reflected wider socio-political currents in the European Reformations. Two development were particularly important. The Jesuit mission to England, coinciding with the papal-Hispano orchestrated Irish rebellion and Elizabeth’s contemplation of the Anjou match, led to harsher anti-Catholic reprisals and the depiction of English Jesuits, and—to a lesser degree—all English Catholics, as traitors.Footnote ²⁹ Additionally, the French Catholic League emerged in the 1580s as a powerful force, which could aid the beleaguered English Catholic community, and which required emotive Catholic martyrologies for its anti-Calvinist propaganda.Footnote ³⁰ These factors made a rhetoric of innocent English Catholic martyrs, shedding their blood for their faith and country, unjustly executed by blood-seeking Protestants, an invaluable weapon for the English Catholic community and their continental ally, the Catholic League.

Confessional disagreement over the functions of martyrs’ blood

The descriptions of martyrs’ blood in Protestant and Catholic works can appear very similar, but closer inspection reveals more differences than similarities. Both repeatedly describe martyrs’ blood ‘witnessing’. For example, in the Acts and Monuments, Hooper states, ‘I have taught the truth with my tongue, and... my pen... and... shortly will confirm the same by God’s grace with my blood.’Footnote ³¹ Similarly, Thomas Alfield, speaking of Edmund Campion and his fellow martyrs, depicts ‘their last protestation, washed, sealed, & confirmed with their blood’.Footnote ³² Both here draw upon the Greek etymology: ‘μάρτυς’ in the New Testament means a ‘witness’, while the verb ‘μαρτυρέω’ means to bear witness/testify/declare/confirm. Yet, there are critical confessional differences in understandings of the witness of martyrs’ blood. For Catholics, it witnesses to the true faith and has supernatural power. For Protestants, the witnessing power is its only function: they deny that it possesses supernatural power. Moreover, Protestant martyrs’ blood bears witnesses both to the true faith and to the impending apocalypse.

In Catholic writings, the supernatural power of martyrs’ blood can change objects and people around it. This is illustrated by two incidents described by the missionary priest John Gerard. The first involves a pilgrimage in 1601 to St Winefrid’s well (Wales) by the missionary priest Father Oldcorne. Gerard recounts that when St Winefrid was beheaded (7^th century AD) a powerful spring burst forth from where her head had lain. In the stream ‘can [still] be found stones covered or at least sprinkled with blood’.Footnote ³³ These stones were transformed, by St Winefrid’s blood, into relics with healing powers. Oldcorne had been suffering from cancer of the mouth, but on encountering one of these stones he ‘began to lick the stone and hold part of it to his mouth. He prayed silently all the time. After half an hour he got up – all his pain was gone and the cancer cured.’Footnote ³⁴ Thus we see a Catholic understanding of martyrs’ blood as able to change objects into relics, and to change pious people by effecting healing.Footnote ³⁵ The second incident concerns the conversion to Catholicism of the future-martyr Henry Walpole. Present at the execution of Edmund Campion, his clothes had been smattered with Campion’s blood, and he subsequently converted to Catholicism, writing ‘some beautiful English verses… telling how the martyr’s blood had brought warmth into his heart’.Footnote ³⁶ Thus we see that in Catholic thought martyrs’ blood had the power to effect a change of heart.Footnote ³⁷

For Catholics, martyrs’ blood also possessed expiatory power: it functioned as a sacrifice (similar to Old Testament sacrifices and Christ’s expiating sacrificial death), calling for God’s mercy and forgiveness of sins.Footnote ³⁸ William Allen reproduces a letter Edmund Campion wrote to his superior while on the English mission, stating, ‘Very many even at this present being restored to the Church, new soldiers give up their names, while the old offer up their blood. By which holy hosts and oblations, God will be pleased: and we shall no question, by him overcome.’Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, Richard Holtby, reporting persecution in the north, reproduces a letter Anthony Page wrote from prison to his Protestant mother, a few days before his martyrdom:

And, the martyr Robert Southwell’s poem ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’ paralleled Christ’s blood sacrifice (in both his Passion and the Eucharist) with Southwell’s desire to sacrifice his own blood in martyrdom.Footnote ⁴¹ Sacrifices, in Judeo-Christian theology, have a communal rather than an individual impact; thus, this shedding of martyrs’ blood was an expiation and sacrifice for the whole community, as expressed in Parsons’ An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in Englande, where he beseeches God to accept the martyred priests’ innocent blood for the community of the English nation (both Catholics and their persecutors).Footnote ⁴²

This sacrificial function of Catholic martyrs’ blood highlights the strong continuities between medieval and early-modern Catholic theology. In the medieval west ‘a soteriological theory… is reflected everywhere… it is the theory of sacrifice. The wonderful blood of the lamb—shed, sprinkled on the altar, and lifted to God—is the instrument of salvation’, and this ubiquitous notion of salvific sacrificial blood is not limited to Christ’s blood, but includes the blood of Christians.Footnote ⁴³ From the early Church, Christians had believed that Christ’s death changed the nature of martyrdom, so that martyrdom was a sacrifice which imitated Christ’s sacrifice, and martyrs’ blood imitated Christ’s blood.Footnote ⁴⁴ This was intrinsically linked with the Eucharistic theology of the real presence: it was believed that Christians receive and become part of the body and blood of Christ through consuming his body and blood in the Eucharist, and thus when they are martyred it is the body of Christ which bleeds.Footnote ⁴⁵ In medieval England, this theology was encapsulated in the cult of the martyr Thomas Becket’s blood, deliberately represented in a manner evocative of the Eucharist, and drunk by medieval Catholics as—like the Eucharist—it was believed to have healing powers.Footnote ⁴⁶ The patristic notion of the expiatory sacrifice of martyrs’ blood was further supported by two key developments in medieval Catholics theology. First, the strong emphasis in medieval theology on all humanity being subsumed into Christ in His death on the cross (and in its echo in each Mass) and offered up to God. Secondly, medieval writers stressed the notion of synecdoche; thus, a martyr could shed their blood to expiate and sanctify not only themselves but the whole community.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore, depictions of expiatory sacrificial martyrs’ blood in early-modern Catholic martyrologies draw upon a web of Eucharistic and martyrological theology which developed through the patristic and medieval periods.

This theology came under assault in the Reformation, as a consequence of Protestant Eucharist theologies, leading to very different confessionalized understandings of the nature and function of martyrdom and martyrs’ blood. If the real presence was rejected, together with the idea that Christ’s sacrifice could be continued or repeated on any later occasion (such as in each Mass, or indeed in each martyr’s death), dying martyrs could not be subsumed into Christ’s death, and their blood could not possess the expiatory salvific powers of his blood. Protestant writers explicitly condemned the notion that martyrs’ blood possessed any salvific value, often framed within a wider attack on the Catholic concept of the treasury of merit. Bale and Foxe attacked the cult of Thomas Becket, Bale complaining that Catholics had ‘made his bloud equal with Christ’s bloud and desired to climb to heaven thereby’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, Hugh Latimer attacked the cult of the martyrs in general, stating ‘the blood of martyrs hath nothing to do by way of redemption: the blood of Christ is enough for a thousand worlds’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Scottish reformer John Borthwick lays out the most explicit renunciation of martyrs’ blood’s salvific power. After explaining the traditional Catholic belief, he presents the Protestant position, which centres around blood witnessing (the word is repeated twice, followed by the synonym ‘confirm’):

This Protestant divergence from the medieval heritage, unlike the continuities between Catholic medieval and early-modern conceptions of martyrdom and martyrs’ blood, calls into question the proposition that there was a cross-confessional early-modern construction of martyrdom which stood in contrast to the medieval conceptions of martyrdom which had preceded it. Rather, Protestants broke decisively with medieval precedent, and diverged sharply from the Catholic position, Protestant martyrological writings rejecting the concept of martyrs’ blood possessing supernatural power.Footnote ⁵¹ As well as attacking the notion of the salvific power of martyrs’ blood, they also attacked the idea that it possessed miraculous powers. This was often achieved through silence, omitting such depictions, or replacing them with wonderous natural occurences. The latter tactic was favoured particularly by Foxe, who filled his Acts and Monuments with mirabilia. Medieval theologians, above all Thomas Aquinas, had developed Patristic notions of the miraculous, and while there were divergences over how to categories miracles, how they functioned, and by whom they could be worked, there was unanimity that miracles were supernatural events, intrinsically outside of what could occur naturally without any divine (or demonic) intervention.Footnote ⁵² To take Michael Goodich’s definition, a miracle was understood to be ‘a phenomenon which confounds or even appears to contradict the normal rules governing nature or society’.Footnote ⁵³ Highly rare or extraordinary phenomena, which nonetheless are explicable in natural terms, were not seen as miracles; following the tradition of encyclopaedists and natural philosophers, these were termed by the thirteen-century theologian Albertus Magnus ‘mirabilia’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Foxe evidently concurred with the official cessationist Calvinist stance, disavowing belief in the contemporary existence of the miraculous throughout his Acts and Monuments. He writes scathing of Thomas Becket, ‘If God in these latter days giveth no miracles to glorify the name of his own son: much less will he give miracles to glorify T. Becket’; instead, he deployed mirabilia in his martyrological accounts as acts of divine confirmation that the Protestant martyrs were true martyrs.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Acts and Monuments replaces supernatural signifiers with natural signifiers. God communicates and operates exclusively through the natural: this communication is divine providence operating through the laws of nature. These providential natural wonders occur at points where Foxe’s narrative, had it been Catholic, might have utilised a miracle; they perform many of the same narrative roles, but reveal a very different view of materiality and of God’s interaction with his creation. Bishop Hugh Latimer had prayed that he would shed his heart’s blood for Christ; at his burning his prayer was answered very literally, most of his blood gushing out of his heart in astonishing abundance, making the godly onlookers marvel.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is an unexpected occurrence, yet there is nothing clearly supernatural about the event, as Foxe recounts it:

The gushing of the blood out of Latimer’s body is, Foxe states, due to the force of the fire opening up his body, and is an unusual, but not intrinsically unnatural, event which signifies that God heard Latimer’s prayers and ‘graciously granted his request’. This in turns infers that Latimer is a true child of God and a true martyr belonging to the true Church.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, while Protestant martyrs’ blood can occasionally behave in spectacularly wondrous ways, akin to miraculous Catholic martyrs’ blood, it cannot heal, it cannot mediate grace to objects or to people, and is not expiatory: its functions are limited to the natural.

Thus, again we see the absence of a shared cross-confessional language of martyrdom. While early-modern Catholics upheld the dual functions of martyrs’ blood as witnessing and possessing supernatural powers, in line with orthodox medieval precedent, Protestants departed radically from this mould in eschewing the supernatural.

Differences between Protestant and Catholic writers’ treatments of persecutors

Martyrological writings also differed in other confessionally-specific ways. Protestant accounts devoted far more space to depictions of ‘bloody persecutors’ and the persecutors’ fates.Footnote ⁵⁹ Catholic texts concentrated heavily on the martyrs and their expiating blood, rarely featuring frequent depictions of ‘bloody’ enemies. Catholicism thus continued the medieval trend, since medieval martyrologies and hagiographies were primarily intended as mirrors of holiness for readers to imitate, focusing intensely on the holy person, as seen in the titles of compilations like the Speculum Sacerdotale. Medieval Catholic martyrological accounts generally included a lengthy vita, depicting the martyrs’ holy life, as well as a passio, depicting the martyr suffering at the hands of their wicked enemies: although the martyrs’ persecutors often did meet unpleasant ends if they did not repent, the primary focus of the work was on the martyr rather than their enemies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Protestant martyrologies broke with this trend, often focusing as much (sometimes even more) on the martyrs’ enemies. They often omitted or significantly abbreviated the traditional vita, so that the passio was the main constituent. Additionally, the traditional medieval cautionary depiction of the unrepentant persecutor’s fate was sometimes intensified and given extensive treatment.

The Acts and Monuments demonstrate compellingly this Protestant shift wherein the persecutors constitute at least as significant a focus as as the martyrs. Sir Thomas More and Bishop Bonner are present more frequently, and in more vivid and memorable detail, than any of the Protestants they persecute. This is the culmination of earlier features of English Protestant martyrological writings, by Bale and others. The language of martyrs’ blood serves primarily to identify and attack the individuals responsible for their deaths. For example, Bale identifies the red horse of Revelation with the Roman Catholic clergy, the red colour indicating the martyrs’ blood they have shed.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, Foxe depicts the clergy who persecuted the Lollards as ‘bloud thirsty ravenours’, the Marian clergy as ‘blood guilty homicides’, and his Roman Catholic contemporaries as ‘bloody children of the murdering mother Church of Rome’.Footnote ⁶² The Marian martyr John Philpot exclaims at his final trial before Bishop Bonner, ‘Let all men beware of your bloody church’!Footnote ⁶³ Echoing the Marian martyrs’ writings, the weight of Foxe’s derogatory polemic is heaped on Bishop Bonner, who was responsible for about a third of the executions The martyr Browne tells Bonner, ‘ye be a bloodsucker, and I would I had as much blood, as is water in the sea, for you to suck’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Protestant martyrological writings depict the martyrs’ innocent blood crying out to God for vengeance, drawing on Biblical depictions of innocent blood crying out to the Lord to be avenged, e.g. Revelation 6:9-10 where the martyrs cry, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ Foxe’s Acts and Monuments presents the fullest depiction; he records meticulously the terrible fates of those responsible for the bloodshed. In the Protestant mentality, God’s punishment upon those who have shed martyrs’ blood is not reserved for the Last Judgement and damnation in the next life; it begins in this life.Footnote ⁶⁵ Foxe’s account of the executions of John Fisher and Thomas More, both depicted as responsible for numerous Protestant martyrs’ deaths, is summarised in the marginalia with ‘Blood revenged with blood’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Foxe sees this retributory justice as sometimes involving a literal ‘eye for an eye’: several key figures guilty of Protestant bloodshed are punished by literally bleeding to death. For example, Charles IX of France, whom Foxe considered partially responsible for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, expired with ‘his blood gushing out by divers parts of his body’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Foxe clearly does not see as unusual the fate of Charles IX, or other persecutors who bleed to death; rather, it illustrates perfectly his ‘blood for blood’ principle. In his Preface addressed to his Catholic readers (‘To the persecutors of God’s truth, commonly called papists, another preface of the author.’), he warns that, unless they repent, God will punish them in this life for their complicity in the persecution of Protestants: ‘Think you blood will not require blood again? Did you ever see any murder, which came not out, and was at length repayed? Let the example of the French Guise work in your English hearts, and mark you well his end.’Footnote ⁶⁸ On a factual level, Foxe’s assertions of the fates of these persecutors are, of course, questionable; we should read them as a vivid reflection of the Protestant belief that their martyrs’ blood would be avenged by God in this life and in that to come.

Catholic martyrologies, in contrast, focused, perhaps even more than medieval Catholic martyrologies, on the victims rather than the perpetrators. While Protestant martyrologies primarily attacked the brutal and wicked nature of the Roman Catholic authorities, Catholic martyrologies primarily offered a mirror of holiness and a promise that the martyrs’ supernatural blood would re-convert England. Direct attacks on the character of the Protestant authorities were usually only a secondary concern. Whereas Bale and Foxe referred incessantly to the blood-thirsty or blood-stained nature of their enemies, such references are rare even in the most polemic Catholic martyrological writings, as are ad hominem attacks on individuals as ‘bloody’ persecutors, which Catholic martyrological texts reserve for exceptionally unjust and/or enthusiastic persecutors.Footnote ⁶⁹ Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon and President in the North, is the only individual regularly described as bloodthirsty, due to his passionate campaign to wipe out Catholicism in the North and his use of the most stringent penalties available.Footnote ⁷⁰ Less vitriolic than Protestant texts in their condemnation of persecutors, Catholic texts emphasise more strongly the possibility of cleansing by repentance. Like Protestant martyrs’ blood, Catholic martyrs’ blood is occasionally described as calling for God’s vengeance, but more commonly cries for God’s mercy, as in Allen’s An Apologie, where ‘blood voluntarily yielded, crieth forcibly for mercy towards our country’.Footnote ⁷¹ The differences between Protestant and Catholic treatments of the martyrs’ persecutors reflects distinctive features of Catholic and Calvinist theologies. While Calvinist theology recognised the possibility of conversion and redemption of individuals among confessional opponents, it was nonetheless by nature more ‘othering’ than Catholic theology, in that it pitted a godly minority against a reprobate majority, created deliberately by God as vessels of destruction. Thus, Calvinism’s worldview lent itself to narratives of a tiny, beleaguered and bleeding true Church, persecuted by a large, powerful and blood-thirsty false Church, whose reprobate murderous members come to horrific earthly ends in providential anticipation of their fate at the Last Judgement.Footnote ⁷² In contrast, Catholicism saw salvation as potentially open to every individual, as it understood God to call and will every individual to be saved, thus their salvation hinged upon their free choice to accept or reject that call. God’s grace was nonetheless essential in the salvatory process, as Catholicism shared Calvinism’s Augustinian perspective of human nature as deeply fallen and depraved. In Catholicism, grace frequently operated through the material world, as in the sacraments and in miracle-working people, objects and places. Thus, Catholicism lent itself to narratives of the holy martyrs’ blood mediating God’s grace to the martyrs’ confessional opponents, so they might choose to turn to the true faith.

This difference between Protestant and Catholic treatments of their martyrs’ persecutors also reflects the different foci of each confessions’ martyrologies. Protestant martyrologies are more outward-looking, turning the spotlight onto their confessional enemies to criticise and undermine Catholic individuals and the Catholic Church as an institution; Protestant martyrs are primarily used as tools in this polemic. Protestant martyrological writings thus break with the medieval use of the martyrological tradition as a mirror, and instead utilise it as a weapon. Catholic martyrologies stand somewhere between the medieval and the Protestant positions. There are some references to bloody enemies and bleeding martyrs, creating an image of English Protestantism as cruel and unjust; however, the spotlight remains on the Catholic martyrs themselves, and the medieval focus on the vita (to be imitated by the reader) is retained.Footnote ⁷³

The dialogue between Protestant and Catholic martyrologies can be seen as reflecting traditional legal disputes, with Protestantism as the accuser and Catholicism as the defendant. Both sides focus primarily on the nature and role of Catholicism. Protestantism accuses Catholicism of corruption and murder and is certain that a damning sentence will soon be passed against Catholicism. Catholicism protests innocence, alleges persecution by Protestantism, and is confident that Protestantism’s case will in time be shown to be nonsensical, and Catholicism will regain her freedom. Considering these points, we see why Protestant martyrologies were more polemic, and presented a more pessimistic narrative of present and future events in this world (though, nonetheless, ultimately optimistic, in awaiting the justice of the Last Judgement and joy of heaven). They believed that their martyrs suffered and witnessed in a world populated by an irredeemable Catholic majority; the only power for change the Protestant martyrs’ blood possessed was to call down the apocalypse and divine judgement. In contrast, Catholic martyrologies were more defensive, inward-looking, and optimistic (concerning present and future events in this world). They focused on the supernatural, expiatory bloodshedding of their martyrs, which had the power to witness to and change the hearts of the martyrs’ opponents, and was the means by which the persecution of Catholics would cease and England would return to Catholicism.

Differences between Protestant and Catholic martyrologists’ constructions of femininity

This difference in tone and outlook between Protestant and Catholic martyrologies is exemplified by their gendered language, reflecting the fact that ‘vocabularies of gender were a crucial resource for describing and redressing other forms of difference and disorder in the early modern period’.Footnote ⁷⁴ These works combined themes of femininity, martyrdom, and blood to produce opposing images, which reflect the essential dissonance between Protestant and Catholic notions of martyrdom and martyrology, even in the very language and imagery underpinning their constructions of martyrdom.

The place accorded to femininity in both Protestant and Catholi rhetorics of martyrs’ blood converge on the depictions of Catholicism; yet, two very different constructions of early-modern Catholicism emerge. Protestantism used a language of martyrs’ blood and femininity almost exclusively to describe the Whore of Babylon, seen as synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ⁷⁵ In the context of a rhetoric of blood in Protestant texts, femininity signifies grave disorder, and femininity combined with power equals extreme unnatural malevolence: ‘Upon this beast [of the apocalypse] sitteth a woman. For what else avanceth or beareth out this malignant muster.’Footnote ⁷⁶ The natural hierarchical order is turned upside down: ‘[She] sit upon this bloody beast as to be stayed quieted and settled by them [the Catholic clergy].’Footnote ⁷⁷ It is a woman, not a male warrior, who sits on a bloody beast, as though riding into battle (a male sphere). The men’s role is to pacify and appease her, suggesting that her naturally volatile female emotions dominate the scene. The Catholic clergy are emasculated and feminized by occupying the place that propertly belongs to women: a position of ‘subordination’ and ‘dependence’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In contrast, the overbearing female figure is masculinised through her violence: the Catholic clergy are ‘bloody children of the murdering mother [signifying the Catholic Church]’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Female agency here equates to violence and an inversion of the natural gender order.Footnote ⁸⁰

Protestant texts use imagery combining femininity, blood, and martyrdom to associate Catholicism with scandalous sins. We see Catholic bishops, who have taken a vow of chastity, having sexual intercourse with a whore [the Whore of Babylon], who occupies the subversive ‘on top’ position: ‘Mark what labours and pains that crafty and wily Winchester taketh with Bonner, Tunstall, and other of his fashion… to hold up this glorious whore in her old estate of Romish religion. Oh he grunteth and groaneth, he sweateth and swelleth, he fretteth and belleth, he bloweth and panteth.’Footnote ⁸¹ Catholicism, cast as a woman, appears drunk senseless on the liquor of martyrs’ blood: ‘Besides all Godly wisdom is she and forgetful of herself through this same bloudy drunkeness so great excess hath she taken.’Footnote ⁸² Additionally, she so gorges herself on blood that spontaneous human combustion from overeating results: ‘And she shall not have her fill / Of blood until she bursts.’Footnote ⁸³

These types of polemic imagery are not found in Catholic martyrologists’ attacks on Protestantism. Catholic texts make few lengthy metaphorical attacks on their opponent, and not through a language of femininity. The focus is on the nature of Catholicism, rather than that of her opponent. While Protestant martyrological writings seek to prove Protestantism true by proving Catholicism false, Catholic martyrological writings prove Protestantism of necessity false by proving Catholicism true. Thus, Catholic martyrologies’ use of gendered language focuses on the Catholic Church and her martyrs. In short, the two confessions’ imagery of femininity, martyrdom and blood is diametrically opposed, and encapsulates their wider differences in tone and foci.

This is exemplified by John Mush’s martyrology of Margaret Clitherow, in which Clitherow, a self-sacrificial martyred mother, parallels the self-sacrificial maternal Catholic Church.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is notable that Foxe never takes this angle, despite featuring pregnant and nursing martyrs in his Acts and Monuments; he focuses exclusively on arguing that only brutal persecutors would put a pregnant or nursing woman to death. Because Mush, unlike Foxe, sees martyrs’ blood as life-giving (due to its expiatory, salvific, and supernatural powers), he aligns Clitherow’s maternity, and especially her breast milk (in early-modern medicine thought to be the product of blood) with the blood she sheds in martyrdom: ‘I mind by God’s assistance to spend my blood in this faith, as willingly as I ever put my paps to my children’s mouths.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Although the two most famous Protestant martyrologies featured female martyrs (Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Bale’s Examinations of Anne Askew), they did not use a language of maternity, blood and martyrdom to depict their martyrs as images of the Mother Church. In contrast, Mush’s depiction of the Church at the outset of his martyrology parallels Clitherow’s maternal identity:

This contrasts with the Protestant imagery of female agency in combination with blood and martyrdom. The Catholic depiction of the Church here invests a female with considerable agency, but within the gender prescriptions for suitable female behaviour. The Church fights not through violence but self-sacrifice; the blood she sheds is her own. Her natural maternal and female instincts are emphasised: she is fertile and protects her children. It is her Protestant enemies who want what is unnatural, attempting to suppress and destroy her maternity and fecundity, but she confounds them. Whereas Protestant martyrologies combine themes of femininity, martyrdom and blood to produce an image of what is unnatural, disdainful, and evil, Catholic martyrologies combine the same themes to promote what is natural, admirable, and holy. Again, the apparent thematic similarity dissolves into fundamental differences.

Dissimilarity between the confessions’ understandings of the temporal meaning of early-modern martyrdoms

The essentially dissimilarity between the confessions’ understandings of martyrdom is also evident in their understandings of the temporal meaning of early-modern martyrdoms. Protestant martyrological writings depict martyrs’ blood calling for and signalling the apocalypse; Catholic martyrological writings, in contrast, almost always understand contemporary persecution as a brief intermission in the golden age of Catholic Christendom, since the blood of Catholic martyrs will expiate and purify the country and convert confessional opponents.

Much research has been devoted to the development of Protestant apocalypticism, especially the works of Bale and Foxe, including classifying their apocalyptical beliefs and exploring their use of the medieval heritage.Footnote ⁸⁷ English Catholic apocalypticism has received far less attention, and the scholarship has not yet enaged with the historiography on martyrdom. Comparing Protestant and Catholic martyrologies’ apocalyptic perspectives casts further doubt on the thesis that Protestant and Catholic martyrologies are essentially similar and both contrast with the medieval precedent.

English Protestant martyrological writings are located within a medieval precedent in their use of bloody apocalyptic language, but it is primarily heretical rather than orthodox. As early as the Cathars in the thirteenth century, Western medieval heresies identified the Pope and the Catholic Church with the forces of evil in Revelation.Footnote ⁸⁸ For example, Monta of Cremona’s Summa (c. 1241) states that the Cathars identify the apocalyptical beast and whore (‘drunk with the blood of the saints’) as the Catholic Church and the pope, and the saints as Cathar martyrs.Footnote ⁸⁹ Similarly Bernard Gui, in the early fourteenth century reports that the heretical Beguins and Franciscans see the Catholic Church as the whore, drunk on ‘the blood...of those four Friars Minor who were condemned and burned at Marseille as heretics, [and] the blood of the Beguins of the third order who in years past were condemned as heretics in the province of Narbonne.’Footnote ⁹⁰ Protestant writers depicted such medieval heretics’ martyrdoms as signposts upon the road to the apocalypse, often associating them with Satan’s release from his one-thousand-year-long bondage and the commencement of the sixth age of the world.Footnote ⁹¹ Protestant writers portray Reformation martyrs and medieval heretics as united in their persecution by an antichristian Roman Church; they shed their blood in witness to the true faith, and—once martyred—cry out to God to avenge their blood. This paradigm began in English Protestant writings, with Fish’s Supplicacyon depicting England, from the medieval period, standing ‘tributary’ ‘unto a cruel develish bloodsupper drunken in the blood of the saints and martyrs of christ.’Footnote ⁹² It was most fully developed by Bale and Foxe.

Bale and Foxe both wrote commentaries on just one Biblical book—Revelation. For both, Revelation, was ‘the hermeneutical key to all ecclesiastical history’; as Bale wrote, ‘The very complete sum and whole-knitting up is this heavenly book [Revelation] of the universal verities of the Bible.’Footnote ⁹³ A strong apocalyptic framework underlay their constructions of martyrdom. They did not converge on all details: Bale saw the witnesses referred to in Revelation 6:11 as Wycliffe and his contemporaries, while Foxe saw them as Hus and Jerome of Prague; Bale refused to date the apocalypse, beyond it being imminent, while Foxe stated that it would occur in 1594, unless God shortened the time frame for the elect’s sake (Matthew 24:22).Footnote ⁹⁴ However, the apocalyptic commentaries of both vividly depicted the blood of the martyrs, medieval heretics and Protestants alike, crying out for God’s avenging apocalypse and signalling its advent: ‘their innocent death fiercely asketh and requireth the great indignation, vengeance, and terrible judgement of God, upon those tyrants… And this is their [the martyrs’] daily cry… How long time will it be ere thou judge them to damnation? What years will thou take ere thou revenge our blood’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The apocalyptic plagues and punishments of Revelation are the consequence of the martyrs’ blood crying out to God to be avenged. This perspective was mirrored in Bale’s martyrology of Anne Askew and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.Footnote ⁹⁶

In contrast, Catholic writings did not associate their martyrs’ blood with the apocalypse. The figure of the bloody Antichrist is absent, as are suggestions that blood-guilt will bring down apocalyptic plagues and punishments. Catholic martyrological writings usually do not depict their age as the Last Times; rather, they expectantly await a future time when England will be Catholic again, and often see the powerful martyrs’ blood as the agent of this change. Allen writes confidently in An Apologie that ‘Truth prevaileth in time... specially the truth of Christ’s religion, which riseth when it is oppressed, and flourisheth when it is most impugned’ since ‘God never suffereth it to cease or fail in any Country: though it stand with travail and blood.’ He sees martyrdom as a ‘grace’ given by God which ‘is a joyful sign of mercy’ that He ‘will not forsake the place nor people’, and a sign that God will send ‘a calm, or the conversion of the whole’. Allen states unequivocally that the Catholics await this calm (lifting of persecution) or the reconversion of the whole of England, and see present tribulations as period of God’s chastisement for their sins.Footnote ⁹⁷

This difference in apocalyptic thought reveals two very different constructions of the meaning of martyrdom and martyrs’ bloodshed. But a further critical difference between Protestant and Catholic martyrologies can be uncovered from these differing perspectives: they have substantially different notions of how God works within time. This should, perhaps, immediately be obvious, considering the frequent Protestant protests in martyrologies such as the Examinations of Anne Askew and the Acts and Monuments that Christ cannot be present in the Eucharist because He is present in heaven, and cannot be in two places at once, or the Protestant belief that all Catholic miracles are false since the age of Christian miracles ceased with the last apostle’s death. Yet, scholars have shown surprisingly little interest in the differences in confessional perspectives on time.

Roland Betancourt argues that by the medieval period there was a different understanding of time in the Eastern versus Western Churches: ‘the Latin Church’s future-driven Last Judgment operates on an event-based history that is to come, whereas the Byzantine Church conceives of history as a fulfilment that is in a perpetual present-orientated state of manifestation.’Footnote ⁹⁸ The point is intriguing, but Betancourt overstates his case. Two different notions of time, and especially of apocalyptic time, were present in the medieval West, one more favoured among heretical groups, and one by the orthodox Western Church. Early-modern Protestantism and Catholicism each tended towards a different notion. Overall, medieval Catholicism’s understanding of the apocalypse focused ‘more on moral issues, ones that speak to the present… especially the moral dilemma of the individual’;Footnote ⁹⁹ ‘the medieval consensus [was] that apocalyptic texts are to be read as moral allegories’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In contrast, medieval heretical groups were already interpreting the apocalypse in a more literal, historical fashion.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This calls into question the sharp divide depicted by historians such as Thomas Lond between ‘the medieval consensus’ and ‘Protestant historicising tendencies’.Footnote ¹⁰² These differing medieval schools of thought had their heirs in the early-modern confessionalisation of apocalyptic standpoints. Common medieval heretical perspectives were reflected in a Protestant apocalypse which was historical, precise, and imminent—reflected in unmistakable historical signposts (including martyrs’ blood-shedding), and which could be mapped out with reasonable precision onto the medieval and recent past, and even into the future, as in Foxe’s Eicasmi and the multitude of complex commentaries, tables and diagrams produced by the Protestant printing presses.Footnote ¹⁰³ Common medieval Catholic perspectives were reflected in an early-modern Catholic apocalypse which was both a mysterious, more distant future event and a moral allegory applied to an individual’s present circumstances. But the disconnection between these notions of time was far wider, and underlies many of the issues for which believers were martyred (e.g was Christ’s sacrificial death present in each Mass?) and the way their martyrdoms were understood and represented (e.g. could they have any salvific value, and could martyrs’ sanctity and orthodoxy be confirmed by miracles?). Martyrological narratives were at the heart of a confessional battle over rival ways of living in time and conceiving of the connection between past, present, and future. Considering these differing understandings of time and of apocalypticism, and the continuities in each between a medieval precedent and an early-modern confessional stance, it is unhelpfully reductive to depict an early-modern cross-confessional conception of martyrdom which stands in significant contrast to medieval conceptions of martyrdom.

A microcosmic examination of the discrepancy-within-resemblance

Finally, let us turn briefly from a macrocosmic view of the fault lines between the confessions’ constructions of martyrdom to a microcosmic examination of how these elements functioned within martyrological texts, to depict in detail the discrepancy-within-resemblance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1546–7, John Bale published Anne Askew’s account of her examinations, supplemented with his own extensive commentary and account of her martyrdom; it was the first Protestant martyrology of a contemporary English martyr. Over thirty years later, in 1582, Thomas Alfield assembled a disparate set of brief martyrological writings (both prose and poetry) concerning the death of Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin, and Alexander Bryan, supplemented with his own comments. This was one of the first Catholic martyrologies to feature a frequent rhetoric of martyrs’ blood. Both Bale and Alfield were, therefore, writing pioneering sixteenth-century English martyrologies. Of course, there are commonalities—many of them traits which one would expect to find in any Christian martyrology of any time and place—but beneath these largely predictable similarities lie important differences, notably the areas of confessional division discussed in this article.

First, we should note that they are not using this language of martyrs’ blood contemporaneously. In the 1540s, martyrs’ blood rarely featured in English Catholic martyrological texts, so we must look to the early 1580s to find a rhetoric of martyrs’ blood which is comparably frequent to Bale’s, by which point Reformation English Protestant martyrological writing is already beginning to decline.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While Alfield’s compilation of texts are among the first Catholic martyrological texts to employ a frequent rhetoric of martyrs’ blood, they acknowledge no English Protestant influence, nor do they engage directly with the English Protestant rhetoric of martyrs’ blood, bypassing completely the opportunity to criticise or correct it.

Bale’s text is more overtly polemic. He repeated attacks the instution of the Catholic Church, the ‘bloody Synagogue of Satan’ and ‘bloodthirsty church’ which has ‘procured’ the deaths of the martyrs of ‘all ages’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Alfield’s texts, in contrast, spends little time attacking institutional Protestantism, and does not attack the English Protestant Church as an entity, instead focusing almost exclusively on defending Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Bale also engages in more frequent and protracted ad hominem attacks, for example depicting Wrisleye and Rich, two of Askew’s examiners, as worse than Pilate, as Pilate did not wish to shed ‘innocent blood’, whereas they have ‘insatiably thirsted’ for the ‘innocent blood’ of many men and women, and racked Askew with ‘their own polluted bloody tormentors’ hands, ‘til the vains and sinews burst.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In A True Report, although the jury are described as ‘bloody’ this is embedded within a direct appeal to the martyrs’ persecutors to repent in order to be saved.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Bale’s text explicitly and implicitly rejects the traditional notion that martyrs’ blood has supernatural powers. He mocks the cult of Thomas Becket’s blood and rejects the notion that martyrs’ blood possesses any salvific value, scorning those who ‘made his [Becket’s] blood equal with Christ’s blood and desired to climb to heaven thereby’; he also attributes apparent miracles related to Becket’s cult to medieval monastics learning and practising necromancy and trickery from their books, and claims these fake miracles have now ceased due to the closure of the monasteries and their libraries.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Alfield does not deny that salvation comes through the blood of Christ; indeed, he hotly rejects a Protestant rumour that Sherwin died a Protestant because he cried out Christ’s name and ‘reposed himself wholly upon Christ and his passion.’ Alfield protests that, contrary to Protestant propaganda, Catholics ‘do acknowledge all our sufficiency’ in ‘the shedding of Christ’s most precious blood’, which is the ‘sole foundation spring and cause of all merit’.Footnote ¹¹¹ At the same time, Alfield describes the martyrdom of the three men as a ‘bloody spectacle, no doubt a lively sacrifice unto God and a sweet savour unto his Angels’, and the functions of their blood includes cleansing.Footnote ¹¹² There is no contradiction between these beliefs for the Catholics, since, as we have discussed, the martyr is subsumed into Christ’s Passion during their martyrdom, and their blood is united with Christ’s blood. It is due to Christ’s ‘most precious blood’ being the ‘foundation spring and cause of all merit’ that the martyrs’ blood can have sacrificial and cleansing power.

Bale’s text is strongly apocalyptical, and also aligns itself with medieval heresies, depicting continuity between the medieval heretical martyrs and the early-modern Protestant martyrs, both persecuted by the bloody antichristian Catholic Church.Footnote ¹¹³ Alfield’s text opens with a quotation from Revelation: ‘These are they that came out of great tribulation, and have washed their stoles and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet, this is a perfect example of discrepancy-within-resemblance. Alfield’s use of Revelation functions as moral allegory rather than a literal historical timeline of past, present and future. These Catholic texts do not foresee the Apocalypse as imminent. They do not mention the Antichrist. And, far from seeing the martyrs’ blood and deaths as heralding the Last Times, they believe that ‘It is the blood by martyrs shed’ ‘that must convert the land’; soon the English Protestants will run out of hands ‘to shed such guiltless blood’ while still the ‘wise and virtuous’ Catholics will be coming into England to reconvert it.Footnote ¹¹⁵ For these authors, the martyrs’ blood is a cause and herald of the reconversion of England, rather than the apocalypse.

A comparison of Bale’s martyrology of Askew with Alfield’s martyrology of Campion, Sherwin and Bryan exemplifies how several layers of confessional theology combined to produce two separate, yet related, martyrological traditions that were historically contemporary but exhibited largely opposing worldviews and temporalities. Martyrs’ blood, a lynchpin of confessional theologies, functions as a witness to these surface-level commonalities and deeper divisions.

In conclusion, focusing on martyrs’ blood to examine the theologies underpinning Protestant and Catholic constructions of martyrdom suggests that recent historiography requires some re-evaluation. English Protestant and Catholic martyrologies did evolve more in dialogue than isolation; however, this was perhaps less a close conversation than a sequence of monologues, with frequent silences in response to many of each-other’s salient points. There was no common conception of martyrdom across the confessions: constructions of martyrdom voiced largely opposing theological perspectives on the supernatural, the apocalypse, and the nature of time, as well as often having different polemic strategies and primary foci. The notion that early-modern martyrologies were significantly different from medieval conceptions of martyrdom also requires considerable qualification. Evidently, early-modern Catholic and Protestant martyrologies did not reproduce statically medieval models; they adapted them to suit new circumstances, as seen in their more frequent use of a rhetoric of martyrs’ blood. Nonetheless, early-modern Catholic martyrologies were more of a continuation of than a departure from medieval Catholic understandings of martyrdom and of the Catholic faith more widely. Even the claim that Protestant martyrologies break away from medieval conceptions of martyrdom becomes meaningless when one asks which medieval conceptions of martyrdom. Protestant martyrologies as much as Catholic martyrologies were a development of medieval trends in constructing martyrdom and the Christian faith; each drew primarily upon a rival trend. As early-modern Catholic martyrologies took up many trajectories in medieval orthodoxy, so Protestant martyrologies often looked to those in late medieval heresies: divergences over the degree of focus on ‘bloody’ enemies, the contemporary existence of the supernatural, the apocalypse, and perceptions of time, were already present in medieval heretical versus orthodox martyrological writings. In the medieval period these constructions emerged in opposition and contest; this polarity continued into the Reformations, ensuring that there was no common conception of martyrdom.