Examination of Martyrology in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations
The textual and oral components of martyrology in both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation offer an illuminating study on both religious practices as well as methods of rhetoric and advocacy utilized between the two groups. Among the most well known martyrologies is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The method of rhetoric used in this text has a great deal in common with expositions of martyrdom from the Catholic Reformation. Anne Dillon, in explicating the martyrdom of Margret Clitherow notes that the “martyr is constructed through a series of tropes, which revel more complex images, and in doing so the writers invest her with profound cosmic significance” (278).1 Indeed, this imbuing of “cosmic significance” is exactly what is illustrated in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. This is no accident. The similarities between the competing narratives are accomplished through an attentive demarcation of standards of orthodoxy according to one’s position and framing of religio-political reference. Dillon notes these similarities as both Protestant and Catholic narrators worked from “the same martyr topoi to make almost identical claims for their subjects” (278-279). Just as royalty offered their own causa sui to invigorate the movements of culture, so, too, did reformation writers condemn the opposition while lifting up the heroics of that movement’s martyrs with an esteemed deliberation of thought towards the purpose of enforcing and magnifying its images God and country.
Foxe initiates his chapter on Martin Luther by establishing the theological grounds for his position, which sets the barriers in place to anchor the other testimonies of Protestant martyrs. According to Foxe, Luther was “instructed of the full meaning of St. Paul, who repeateth so many times this sentence, ‘We are justified by faith’” (153). In so doing the figurehead of the movement is placed in a majestic, spiritual realm, from which we can draw the rationalization and argumentation of the martyrdom of the rest of the valiant cast in Book of Martyrs. It is interesting to note that John Foxe’s name, as author, didn’t appear until the 1570 printing (King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 23 of 351). Book of Martyrs is, in part, a compilation of stories from other sources. During this period, author and compiler were in large part synonyms so even though Foxe was merely a compiler or editor, he still would have been thought of as an author like we think of today (King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 23-24 of 351).2 The fact that these stories where complied only adds to the communal invocation of relating these stories for the purposes of celebrating the center of one’s movement in both cultural and religio-political terms.
Foxe relates the story of John Hooper, Bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, in terms of the background of nobility as being a graduate of Oxford who is then drawn to God. When King Edward came into the throne, Hooper returns to England from exile in Paris (190). As he prepared to leave, Master Bullinger, who is noted as an acquaintance, remarks, “why rejoice with you and for you [,…] you shall remove not only out of exile into liberty; but you shall leave here a barren, a sour and un unpleasant country, rude and savage; and shall go into a land flowing with milk and honey, replenished with all pleasure and fertility” (Foxe 190). The literary devices employed here serve not only to promote the saintliness of Hooper, but furthermore, envelope the entirety of Edward’s England as having reached a peak. There are strong colonial elements in this martyrdom representing Edward’s England being that which other countries should strive for. The literary device of one man returning home from banishment becomes the story of an entire faith and larger community wishing to place its way of life according to a broader stroke and replicate its successes across Europe. Certainly, from this example it can be demonstrated that through telling these narratives, the compliers sought to touch upon a “cosmic significance,” to borrow Dillon’s words once more, in how their lives reflect the greater movement. (278). From this one can easily contemplate how the Protestant mission, collective and individual, was so strikingly similar to that of the Catholic mission as it sought for political stability and transnational influence.
It could be argued that these texts function in the same language as propaganda. However, given the severity of the suffering of each side under dissent, the tools of propaganda are more in the merit of communicative message in quest of liberation. The overt arch of testimony from both the Protestant stories and the Catholic narratives speak to a duty for communal justice and individual liberty from the opposing orthodoxy in great times of distress. Martyrologies were also used as a type of celebration of religious culture through the function of serving as historical documents. In 1587, in the large publishing center of Antwerp, when Catholicism was reemerging, Richard Verstegan completed a martyrology (Dillon 243). Its four sections featured copperplate engravings and details of the events depicted under each image in the form of verse (Dillon 243-244). The text details Catholic martyrdom under Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth (Dillon 244). Dillon notes that its “finale, and this forms the final scene of the whole work, is the execution of Mary Queen of Scots” (245). Dillon refers to this work as “the most gruesome and explicit images of martyrdom which had emerged thus far in the Reformation” (245). Violence and bloodshed in these stories communicated a message of justifying revenge as well as pointing to a type of society each side strives for. Just as Foxe utilized other texts so, too, did Verstegan. In his book he discussed Franciscan martyrs as well as martyrs from Ireland, which Dillon posits are taken from other texts (247). Borrowing in order to create a discussion from one’s own text that would create a message and environment that is advantageous to one’s own cause is part of the function of martyrologies.3 They send a message that envelops history while at the same time setting the scene for the next page of history yet to be written.
Foxe’s inclusion of the story of Hugh Latimer contributes to the saintly essence of Protestant martyrs under Catholic persecution. Just as in other stories, there is the backstory of Latimer first challenging Catholic doctrine in minor but meaningful ways, in this case speaking the Gospel in English (Foxe 264). This highlights the vernacular premise of acquiring faith in one’s own language as a source of inspiration and liberation. Under King Edward, Latimer was imprisoned, but then freed under Queen Elizabeth (Foxe 279). Foxe not only portrayed Latimer’s story in terms of the hostility of forced suppression, but also Godly cheer, writing “Yes, such a valiant spirit the Lord gave him, that he was able not only to despise the terribleness of prisons and torments, but also to laugh to scorn the doings of his enemies” (276). This creates three-dimensional individuals that communicate both the living history of the events that had taken place as well as the missionary message of their faith.
The realities of printing also determined inclusion in Foxe’s texts. There were aesthetic elements to consider beyond the message of his work. Elizabeth Evenden points out that the stories included were also “determined […] by the logistical demands of the printing process” (90). Evenden further illustrates,
The endings for Book 6 and, in particular, Book 8 appear surprisingly discursive and anticlimactic. This stems not from idiosyncratic whim of Foxe’s but rather from an unexpected need to add filler. (90)
Still, what is lacking in formula from a rushed press is compensated for in sticking with the tradition of illustrations of condemnation. According to King, “speeches with the woodcuts of the Book of Martyrs” that contain “the last words of condemned heretics who are going up in flames” are among the “most memorable” (“Reading the Woodcuts” 196).4 The framing tool to transmit last words speaks not only to the desired message, but to the climate and culture and how books are intimately tied into the cultural expressions of living in this age. Martyrologies persist in communicating the persecution and misery of one faction at the hands of another and do so through texts. Books become the living memory of cultural and political expression. The way out of the past is by publishing the opposing side’s exploits and celebrating the conquests and sacrifice of one’s comrades in the story of the eventual defeat of tyranny.
The rhetoric in these stories must reach into the depths of the shared experience to wake the public from both sides from sleep of agony and move them towards the healing of restored normalization. The quest for normalization is not latently hidden in the spirit of these stories or these shared struggles. Public, communal memory dictates that there must be witnesses to the atrocities suffered at hands of the opposition. We find this witnessing through books that make clear God’s role for the individual in how to process and accept such suffering in vernacular terms. With this in mind, we can perhaps read the martyrologies as not just acts of language of rhetorical device, but as intuitive mending that isolates the destruction of one generation to pass on the testimony to the next.
Dillon remarks about narratives compiled towards the end of the sixteenth century for English Catholics, stating “this group of later narratives which contained, in addition, their own further self-defining raisons d’être in that they told the stories of priest who were threatened, fugitive and potential martyrs” (107).5 The centralization of the martyrdom of the priest does two things. It upholds the station and authority of the priesthood and it serves to allow the exploits and sufferings of the priests to stand in for the experiences and collective will of the laity. From our contemporary perspective, we tend to sympathize with the Protestant mission as representing freedom from structured and oppressive authority. However, we must consider how these narratives must have been received to Catholics at that time. They would have been understood for their structure and the message they communicated. There would have been a very firm grasp on the collective experience through the illumination of single actors and as such, there is very little difference between them and Protestant narratives. Each sought to attain and maintain power and connect with greater public that which was in their shared interest.
Shared interest expressed in martyrologies is more than a rhetorical device for print and propaganda. It is a site of vexation and accessibility that mends the collective spirit of the oppressed as well as captures the bargaining methodology of those triumphant in conquest who have mastered the social collective and imposed their religion of identification. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs does just that as it navigates within the territory of collective will and strikes at the heart of what it means to be oppressed and then justified by the Creator in a communal setting. From the Catholic trajectory, the story of Margret Clitherow, much like Protestant stories, demonstrates the need for resilience under oppression and, furthermore, how to hold oneself up with character in the face of tyranny. Despite the torturous details and gruesome interior of some martyrologies, there is similitude in the expression of how to behave with a type of character that demonstrates and shines a light in a dark place, negotiating, in a sense, in such a way that portrays the strengths of faith. Faith, then, is a means of communal action and connectivity that is not only revived in dissent, but also in recovery from the shared memories of oppression and torment.
Verstegan expressed to the Catholic community, in the introduction of his text, the cruel and monstrous suffering of English Catholics (Dillon 148). Dillon cites Verstegan, in which he states, the “bloodthirsty laws and cruel edicts, aimed at the ruin and destruction not only of their fortunes and possessions, but even of their lives and that not only of the present generation but of the future generation also” (Verstegan cited in Dillon 148).6 The framing of these texts transcends the local spirit of disruption and illuminates the larger arch of generational displacement. It is not without accomplishment such a perspective bends the conversation to the collective. In a sense, with such an arch followed by gruesome detail, these texts are themselves public spectacle recreating the depths of what has befallen their community – not just for a testimony or a call to action – but to repatriate the device of action that harmed them in the first place into a movement of reprisal.
(Dillon 130)
One image from Verstegan’s 1582 Praesentis Ecclesiae Angelcanae typus shows a gathering of men with four in the center surrounding a victim whose arms and legs are tied in four directions at the center of a wooden contraption. At the top of the image are several more men seated at a table as though in a position of authority. The inscription underneath the image reads:
That they may betray those in whose houses they have celebrated the sacraments whom they have joined to the holy Church from deadly schism and many such things besides, they stretch their limbs with terrible torments. (Dillon 130)
There is a recreation of torture represented in these images. It is a sharing methodology that works as a continuance of both testimony and contrivance. The act of recreating the opposition’s acts of terror in both images and through story form from either the Protestant or Catholic perspective resorts to a continuance of what it has invested in the fight of faith. This evangelizes its message and maintain a steady surplus of recruits to not let the memory die. The digital humanities functions in the same way, breathing life into old memories and restoring them to “cosmic significance.” In so doing these memories are retained for the next generation to persuade others to enact a form of battle of faith internally as well as in political, domestic, and transnational affairs to be literate in what those in opposition to one’s ideas of capable of doing to suppress their comings and goings in acts of faith. Books are just as much a tool to recall history as they are to act on history and in such a way as to create common sentiment towards one direction or another on moral and ethical discourse.
How we treat others is always a centerpiece in public discourse. Martyrologies unravel the innate sentiments inside us that compel us to proclaim degrees of compassion and remorse. Rather, what one actor or group of actors commits against others in the name of dogma can be recreated in books. The vice of an actor to propagate a message of memory and defensive designation can be a sociological militaristic discourse towards the ends of the (re)creation of ideology. Whether that is royal ideology, secular ideology, or politically invested religious ideology, it frames the center of society as having to move in the direction of its ethical consequences. There are indeed movements within social and political institutions that are dictated by the consequences of history. Some are more impassioned that others. Some are more measured than others. However, there is always a public measurement of the acts of large groups against the free will of others. There is not always a spokesperson or advocate to speak out for what is suffered by minorities. However, history does shift according to the consequences of public acts of faith.
Textual recreation of public distress in the works of Foxe and Verstegan demonstrate that the shared space between rhetorical device and living memory. It should not be surprising then, that the means of communicating this messages was intended for as wide an audience as possible, though not just for the majority of the public alone. Such was the case with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. King discussed the intent of mass exposure, towards both the literate and illiterate, stating there was:
[The] prominent inclusion of wording in [the foldouts], both of speeches and of captions, demonstrates that Foxe and Day did not gear the illustrations in the Book of Martyrs wholly or largely to an audience made up of illiterate individuals. The crown of King John’s head and exaggerated gestures of clerics and the courtier who attends the king would have conveyed the fundamentals sense of this pictorial narrative to unlettered individuals. Nonetheless, the specific sense would be accessible only to those who could read the wording or hear it read. Inclusion of a speech in Latin indicates that this foldout is designed for individuals at all levels of the hierarchy of literacy ranging from aurality to reading of the chief language of learning. (King “Reading the Woodcuts” 196)7
The democratization of communicating the message in the Book of Martyrs among those versed in Latin to those relying on the images for context or having the text read to them illustrates a codependence of transmission. There is the need to the authors or compilers to first engage with these stories in print, but then they live on their own relying on the willingness of the learned to transmit the text to those who cannot read. Still, even those would have found a wealth of communicative messages in the images, which was very common in this period.
The inclusive environment intended in the transmission between the literate and illiterate with these texts was just as much inherited as it was a method of seeing to the author’s own interests. The memorialization of these stories in images, through being read aloud certainly aided of the collective experience these stories represented. Though collective representation, rhetorical devices became agents of living social memory from which inspiration and motivation of religio-political promised lands were sought. If there was one way for these books to better attain their purposes, it was through community defining sharing and telling. Perhaps, that was no small motivation for including Latin alongside images in the Book of Martyrs. If so, it certainly would have been a brilliant move.
The compilations of martyrologies, from Foxe’s to Verstegan’s, push through a holistic treatment of acts suffered at the hands of orthodoxy and indifference. They also tie together a dream and vision of a social order in which there is a collective harmony for their respective group’s interests. In so doing, one could argue that through representations of suffering, these narratives point the way towards a harmony of will that paints a picture of a social order that is condensed to its basest components and treats the suffering in society with a cosmic treatment through reform and realignment of cultural interests.
Through the texts there is something more inclusive occurring that the base patriotism that could be more easily read in a history of Republics. There is a distinction in our current society in which we proclaim that an act or behavior is a call for help. We do well to recall that within those calls for help, there is a movement in the direction – or the appearance of a direction – towards fertile ground in which one many blossom and live according to corresponding values. Perhaps the act of presenting martyrologies in print, in books distributed according to secret and overt means, functioned to move society towards a more fruitful pluralism that not only remedied the standing social ills being presented and recreated in the books, but also complemented to slow movement within the coming age of books of science and reason.
There is the potential that the cults of Reformation and Counter Reformation both are steps in the same direction of renaissance unity. They are, after all, steps in history towards holistic change that ushers in a new era of political representation and religious understanding. In some ways, this interacts with the history of reading and learning through socialized listening and cultural learning. There is the threat of maintaining the ongoing cultural narrative of Western powers structures in attempting to understand the shared space of the history of reading and practice as it attempts to demonstrate a too vulnerable and distracted glance of history as moving in the direction as that which best represents the interest of the observer of history. However, in terms of social defiance and movement away from oligarchy and the social, if not actual cultural-political representations that are collective and unifying, we can see a growth towards reason that erupts from the shared testimony of indoctrinated malpractice. The point here is that through the gruesomeness of Verstegan or the zealotry of Foxe we have a shift in the cultural landscape that has the corresponding act of movement towards social justice through the act of invoking injustice.
There is the weight and certainty that the story of Martin Luther from Book of Martyrs or the representation of sainthood of John Hooper and Hugh Latimer represent is the certain call of justice under forced circumstances and in that they participate in the larger call for justice. With that in mind, this quest for social salvation is what is equally communicated through the martyrologies. The supremacy and authority of these texts represent their placement in history according to reactions to movement of the extreme and any counterweight to that extreme engrains in society the dream for another vision of society. The image of a horse eating the intestines of a Catholic sufferer from Verstegan’s 1587 Theatre of the Cruelties of the Heretics of our Time demonstrates the gaze of history towards reconciliation.
(Verstegan 53)8
Even among the illiterate, the representation of oppression is cleared marked in a universal language as that which must be opposed. The march in history from oppression to opposition and back again, cements in cultural memory social forms. These social forms are illustrated and illuminated in the lasting memory of (re)reading of martyrologies.
The rhetoric, literary and visual devices of martyrologies were intended to take a stand as one side in opposition towards another. Through a language of domination, such as Master Bullinger’s statement to John Hooper, “but you shall leave here a barren, a sour and un unpleasant country, rude and savage; and shall go into a land flowing with milk and honey, replenished with all pleasure and fertility,” there is the crest of language that isolates suffering and political conquest as that which must be countered for peace and security (Foxe 190). There are no reservations in the language of the martyrologies. There is only certainty that there must be a place for peaceable living spaces and stations of life. Verstegan represented anarchy of the other. Foxe memorialized internal cohorts. It has been stated that anger is short-lived. Violence is not a value that transcends social language for the purposes of cultural memory. We seek peaceful solutions towards the ends of our own salvation and that of our neighbors despite the initiatives of those in immediate rule. The martyrologies are memorialization in texts of acts of terror and in being so; they continue to move generations towards a language of shared destiny that is pluralistic and popular. They recall the spaces in which society sought to separate on group from one another, and the resulting demons that were exposed in such acts.
Bibliography
Dillon, Anne. The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. Print.
Evenden, Elizabeth. “Closing the Books: The Problematic Printing of John Foxe’s Histories of Henry VII and Henry VIII in His Book of Martyrs (1570).” Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning. ed. John King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print
Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. ed. W. Grinton Berry. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1911. Print.
King, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture. Kindle ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
—- “Reading the Woodcuts in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning. ed. John King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Print
Verstegan. Richard. Theatrum Crudelitarim Haereticorum Nostri Temporis. Antwerp, 1587.
1 Clitherow was condemned for harboring a priest. The heroics contributed to her include the fact that even in the face of death, she did not reveal that she was pregnant, which may have saved her life (Dillon 278). Her story is highly detailed. She suffered a brutal torturous murder as the narrative demonstrates: “She was in dying about one quarter of an houre, a sharp stone as bigg as a mans fist putt under her back upon her was layd 7 or 8 hundred weights as the lwast which broker all her ribs and made them burst forth of the skin: she lay soe all of the day” (quoted in Dillon 277).
2 Foxe was in communication with other compilers who were held back from completing a compendium of martyrologies in English from various sources and as such, encourage Foxe to complete his own (King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 26 of 351).
3 Dillon states that such borrowing does indeed demonstrate that these stories were available for the purposes of propaganda, such as how Verstegan utilized anti-Calvinist stories (246).
4 King also adds that these “last words” were inscribed within banderols, which were frequent in books as well as other artistic mediums in the late medieval period (196-197).
5 Dillon makes a fundamental observation regarding the Counter Reformation and the priesthood, stating “Their reflection and commentary on community life through the unifying symbol of the martyr encoded this complex internal discourse between the Catholics, their priests and the Protestants, using the prevailing culture and belief of the community, and members of that community itself, to express and make sense of the events which they had witnessed” (107). It was a process, a process of digesting history and moving forward as a community in a way that they most readily understood and identified with.
6 In further terms of this inspired movement towards the collective in martyrologies, Verstegan remarks that his interest lie in seeking to “arouse your charity, piety, and pity [and to] feel the pain of your brothers as we groan, and pray with us as we pray” (Verstegan cited in Dillo 148). There is a stark invocation of collective movement to combat opposition that is as much militaristic as it is an occasion for faithful works.
7 As King points out, those who were “unlettered individuals […] would have relied on hearing the text read aloud” (“Reading the Woodcuts” 196). This really illustrates the community involved in spreading these texts and the messages therein. If we think about this from a contemporary perspective, we can identify with the digital humanities today and how the internet provides a wealth of multimedia platforms in which to illustrate and communicate messages other than text for a global audience where language might be a barrier.
8 As discussed, Theatrum Crudelitarim Haereticorum Nostri Temporis functions equally as a picture book as it does a literary testament. It is a clear form of visual media that relates the experiences of a generation for remembrance so that the pains of forced isolation will not be forgotten or left without social consequence.