Persecution and Martyrdom in the Early Modern Period

Introduction
The fragmentation of western Christianity in the wake of the reformation ended the monolithic power of the Roman Catholic Church, only to bring a new age of persecution in its wake. Princes, magistrates, and reformers sought to enforce their official religion as the only one, equating religious dissent with political and moral disorder; the result was that thousands of martyrs were made, from Protestants during the reign of Mary to Catholics under Elizabeth, from Low Country Calvinists under Charles V to Huguenots under France, and Anabaptists under everyone. But Christians were not the only ones affected by the disruptions of the reformation. Historians still debate the causes, but most agree that the upsurge of witchcraft persecutions in the 16th century was at least partly related to the changes wrought by the reformation; meanwhile, the persecution of Jews was given renewed vigor by the sentiments of many reformers, and Luther above all, even though their own history in the period was marked by the onslaught of the inquisitors, and the earlier, catastrophic expulsion from Spain in 1492. While historians have long been interested in the story of persecution and martyrdom in the early modern period, however, recent decades have witnessed new approaches that overturn traditional assumptions. The Spanish and Italian inquisitions, for example, can no longer be viewed as oppressive mechanisms of arbitrary power that many historians of the past maintained. Nor can the late 17th and 18th centuries be described as ushering in an “age of toleration,” when figures such as Sebastian Castellio, writing in the 16th century, and others before that, have been given more attention for their tolerationist treatises. In the realm of practice, coexistence and boundaries are now the keywords that drive much analysis of relations between conflicting faiths, just as the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, at least on the ground, may not be as severe as once supposed. While lines of demarcation were important, the reality was more fluid than that postulated by the term “persecuting society.” The following bibliography is intended to provide a representative sample of works relating to the enormous historiographical field of religious persecution, martyrdom, and toleration; while it is by no means comprehensive—and English titles are privileged—these studies are chosen in part for the manner in which they represent new approaches to their respective subjects, as well as their capacity to lead students into further directions of research.
General Overviews
Though scholars continue to be drawn into the violent and persecutory aspects of early modern religious history, recent years have witnessed an enormous surge of scholarly interest in evidence of religious coexistence before toleration supposedly “triumphed” with modernity. Influenced by the penal histories of Michel Foucault or studies in ritual and violence, historians once wrote of the workings of a “persecutory society” or an “anthropology of violence” in official workings of power or popular religious riots respectively; even scholars who write about martyrdom and martyrologies today tend to work from a set of presuppositions in which “intolerant” religious policies inevitably led to executions on grounds of faith. But many of the following works complicate this picture by emphasizing the boundaries that could be crossed between faiths in daily interactions, or the contingent acts of indulgence or refrain from persecution on the part of the state. Toleration, in other words, existed before Locke or Voltaire, even if it interacted with intolerant policies and practices.
EDITED COLLECTIONS
Many of the following essay collections attempt to depart from the Enlightenment paradigm of toleration as a modern “triumph” over “dark age” persecution. Grell and Scribner 1996 provides one of the best collections and challenges to this whiggish stance, while the studies in Laursen 2002similarly seek to move beyond the paradigm through close readings of different authors on the subject of heresy. Hsia and van Nierop 2002 explores cases on the ground from the Dutch Republic, while Bonney and Trim 2006 examines the manner in which religious minorities across Europe accommodated themselves to—and were accommodated by—the dominant culture. Finally, religious pluralism is also the subject of the essays in Whelan and Baxter 2003, which takes as its point of departure the issuance of the more “tolerationist” Edict of Nantes.
Bonney, Richard, and D. J. B. Trim, eds. Persecution and Pluralism. Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1700. Papers presented at a conference sponsored by the British Academy held at Newbold College, Berkshire, in 1999. Studies in the History of Religious and Political Pluralism 2. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006.
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A collection of thirteen conference-derived essays with a particularly good introduction outlining issues inherent in the Calvinist experience of religious diversity and accommodation. The Reformed movement and its religious and political adaptations are examined from the perspective of Geneva, England, Scotland, the Dutch Republic, and France.
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Grell, Ole Peter, and Robert Scribner, eds. Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. Papers from a conference held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in September 1994. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511523328Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Authors such as Bob Scribner, Euan Cameron, Diarmaid Macculloch, Andrew Pettegree, Hans Gugisberg, Philip Benedict, Heiko Oberman, and William Monter are represented in this important group of essays. Extending widely across England and Europe, including Poland and Hungary, the authors explore questions of toleration in the wake of the reformations, arguing for a new paradigm that explains toleration’s limited existence in the pre-Enlightenment era.
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Hsia, R. Po-Chia, and Henk van Nierop, eds. Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511496769Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A valuable collection of essays that explores the emergence of religious pluralism from the Dutch Revolt through the Golden Age. Articles include Benjamin Kaplan’s discussion of the “myth” of Dutch tolerance; Willem Frijhoff’s exploration of the degrees of religious freedom, including passive tolerance and active legal freedom; and Jonathan Israel’s study of Spinoza in the context of tolerance and the republic.
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Laursen, John, ed. Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
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Heresy and orthodoxy, religious persecution and toleration are examined from a political, philosophical, and historical perspective. Essays focus on the defense of (and attacks on) heresies through the centuries; Hobbes and the question of toleration; and the continuation of the debates through the 18th century.
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Whelan, Ruth, and Carol Baxter, eds. Toleration and Religious Identity: The Edict of Nantes and Its Implications in France, Britain, and Ireland. Dublin, Ireland: Four Courts, 2003.
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The religious pluralism ushered in by the Edict of Nantes (1598) forms the basis for these essays, which consider the issuance of the edict in the wake of the violent 16th century, and the coexistence and eventual acceptance that resulted from it. The edict’s role in shaping religious identity in the 17th and 18th centuries is also considered, especially the ways in which it influenced countries other than France.
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SINGLE-AUTHORED WORKS
As with the collections of individual essays above, the books in the following section attempt to engage more extensively with the problem of treating toleration and persecution as dichotomous opposites, or as entities located on a linear spectrum of progress. Jordan 1940 represents the older “whiggish” and Anglo-centric approach to toleration, while Walsham 2006 argues in favor of a greater interplay between policies and attitudes of tolerance and intolerance, and Kaplan 2007describes the contingent nature of toleration in practice.Taking a broader approach, Nederman 2000explores theories of toleration across centuries, and the classical and contemporary influences from which they derived. Perhaps more fitting than “toleration” is the term “coexistence,” with Luria 2005providing an excellent example of the degrees to which people of different faiths co-existed with each other.
Jordan, Wilbur K. The Development of Religious Toleration in England. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940.
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A classic work and still necessary to consult, though it represents a very flawed older view of a continuum extending from persecution to toleration, with the latter embodied in the Toleration Act and the triumph of Lockean liberal democratic theory and religious freedom. For a corrective in terms of England, see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689 (New York: Longman, 2000).
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Kaplan, Benjamin. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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One of many studies that attempts to address the recent historiographic changes in the study of toleration, though significant in the geographical scope of its range. Kaplan stresses the local, contingent, and varied circumstances that resulted in a kind of toleration in practice “for people who lived in religiously mixed communities.” Kaplan writes in a reiteration of one of his primary themes, “tolerance had a very concrete, mundane dimension (p. 8)”
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Luria, Keith. Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France. Washington: Catholic University Press, 2005.
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An astute analysis of 16th-century Poitou in the wake of the Edict of Nantes, with Luria examining three “boundaries” (negotiated, hard, and blurred) between confessional (and bi-confessional) groups. Students should consult this work for the framework it postulates as well as the important revisions it offers on the nature of religious coexistence and conflict.
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Nederman, Cary. Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100–1550. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2000.
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A convincing exposition of theories of religious toleration expressed by medieval and early modern writers, including the influences that figures such as Cicero had on them. John of Salisbury, Marsiglio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and Ramon Llull are some of the authors treated in terms of their discussion of religious and cultural differences.
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Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
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A exploration of the attitudes and beliefs toward persecution over two centuries, making the important and convincing argument in favor of the interdependence rather than opposition between tolerance and intolerance. Students should consult this work for an alternative to the traditional perspective that upheld tolerance as “triumphing” over intolerance by the end of the 17th century.
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Encyclopedias and References
Students and scholars may find a number of pertinent articles in the following works, beginning with the great reference volumes for Anabaptist history in Dyck and Martin 1967–1990 and the Global Mennonite Encyclopedia Online; early modern Jewish history is well represented by Skolnik and Berenbaum 2007; and for aspects of Catholic persecutory and martyrological history, students should refer to Catholic University of America 2002. Meanwhile, Burns 2003 is a more recent contribution to the enormous field of early modern witch hunts, with useful bibliographies, whileGregory 2007 presents a short overview incorporating recent scholarship, his own included.
Burns, William. Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003.
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A comprehensive single-volumed reference work that covers the witch hunt across Europe and the colonies of the new world; particularly strong on the judicial mechanisms and procedure of witch trials, including the use of torture. Articles also cover the decline of witch persecution.
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Catholic University of America, ed. New Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Teachings, History, Organization and Activities of the Catholic Church and on All Institutions, Religions, Philosophies and Scientific and Cultural Developments Affecting the Catholic Church from Its Beginnings to the Present. 2d ed. 15 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2003.
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Entries on the inquisition, the Jesuits, Catholic martyrs, and other related topics are included in this standard reference work sponsored and edited by the Catholic University of America. This second revised edition contains articles that reflect more up-to-date scholarship and bibliographical citations. A joint publication with Thomson/Gale; Washington, D.C.
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Dyck, Cornelius J., and Dennis D. Martin, eds. Mennonite Encyclopedia. 5 vols. Scottdale, PA: Mennonite Publishing House, 1967–1990.
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Originally undertaken by Harold Bender and Cornelius Krahn, the Mennonite Encyclopedia (ME) was subsequently revised with the fifth volume to include more recent scholarship. The encyclopedia covers all aspects of Anabaptist history up through the present, with special emphasis on the 16th century and material pertaining to the persecution and martyrdom of Anabaptists.
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Gregory, Brad. “Persecutions and Martyrdom.” In Cambridge History of Christianity: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660. Vol. 6. Edited by R. Po-Chia Hsia, 261–282. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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Gregory provides a concise summary of the subject, examining the persecution of different groups. Useful if somewhat incomplete bibliography. See also William Monter’s chapter on the Mediterranean inquisitions from the same volume (pp. 283–301).
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Skolnik, Fred, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2d ed. 22 vols. Detroit : Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.
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Decades in the making and with a new, updated edition, this “specimen of modern Jewish scholarship” contains more than 21,000 signed entries covering all aspects of Jewish life, culture, and history. Particularly strong on the early modern entries, including ghetto life, the expulsions, and relations with Christians, with cross-references and bibliographies provided.
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Steiner, Sam, and Richard D. Thiessen, eds. Global Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1996–2010.
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An excellent and easily indexed and searchable resource for Anabaptist-related history, including Amish, Mennonite, Hutterite, and Brethren in Christ groups. Much of the material is drawn from modified entries of the Mennonite Encyclopedia, though other material is also included.
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Journals
The following constitutes a very basic list of journals that have published articles on early modern religious history, including its persecutory aspects. Students should be aware that many other journals have offered similar articles on the subject; still, publications such as the Mennonite Quarterly Reviewand Recusant History should be singled out for their more specialized and detailed grasp of their subjects, in this case Anabaptist and English Catholic history, respectively, while theBulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme français focuses on Protestantism in France. For a more general history, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History nearly always includes essays on the subject of early modern religion, while Past and Present has brought in a number of important articles on the persecutory aspects of early modern history. Many journals also exist concerning Jewish history, with Jewish History one of the more noted examples.
Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français (1852–).
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Quarterly journal for the Society for the History of French Protestantism covering all aspects of Protestantism. Includes reviews and research announcements.
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Jewish History (1986–).
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One of the most important journals in the field, covering all aspects of Jewish history, including the early modern period.
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Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1950–).
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Articles on all aspects of the Christian Church throughout history. Notes of recently released books also included; published by Cambridge University Press.
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Mennonite Quarterly Review (1927–).
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Founded by Harold Bender and the Mennonite Historical Society in 1927, the Mennonite Quarterly Review (MQR) is the leading journal for articles relating to the radical reformation, the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Amish. Interdisciplinary and international in scope.
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Past and Present (1952–).
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Oxford University Press’s journal covering all aspects of world and British history, including some very importance contributions to studies of persecution and toleration.
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Recusant History (1951–).
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The historical journal of the Catholic Record Society, Recusant History covers all aspects of the Catholic community in Britain. Registers and other primary sources are often published alongside articles.
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Primary Sources
The primary source material relating to early modern persecutions is enormous, extending across Europe, including Britain, and ranging from government records to popular ballads. The phenomenon of martyrdom was especially well-documented, dominated as it was not only by the massive folio volumes of the great martyrologies, but also by numerous printed ephemera, cheap pamphlets, and visual matter. Fortunately, scholars have edited and translated many of these sources, and placed them in accessible anthologized collections that serve as good introductions to such subjects as the inquisition, the witch hunt, or the Iberian expulsion of the Jews.
EDITED COLLECTIONS
The following is a representative list of selected anthologies that cover most of the persecuted groups or events of the period. Homza 2006 offers a comprehensive selection of sources covering the Spanish Inquisition, while Raphael 1992 focuses not only on the Inquisition but also on the expulsions from both Spain and Portugal. For more overt martyrological compilations, Gregory 2002provides textual outtakes from the works of de Ries and van Braght, while King 2009 is one of the best excerpts (and contextualizations) of passages from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. A number of letters and martyrological biographies exist covering the persecution of Catholics in New France or in Europe; while dated, Pollen 1891 provides one of the better samplings of the trials and executions of Catholic priests that took place in Elizabethan England and beyond, while Morris and Mush 1872–1877 reprints similar material, including memoirs of Catholic families.
Gregory, Brad, ed. Documenta Anabaptistica Neerlandica. Vol. 8, The Forgotten Writings of Mennonite Martyrs. Kerhistorische Bijdragen 18. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2002.
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Despite the English title, the letters and treatises contained in this volume are in Dutch; nevertheless, this is a useful source for writings not included in the martyrologies of Hans de Ries and Thieleman van Braght. Narrative martyr songs are also included.
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Homza, Lu Ann, ed. The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis: Hackett. 2006.
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Homza brings together a range of court documents, testimonials, and letters that traces the Spanish Inquisition from its beginning years, when Ferdinand and Isabella sought to root out crypto-Jews, through the expulsion of the Moriscos between 1611 and 1614. A very helpful introduction is provided.
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King, John N., ed. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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A selection of passages from the Book of Martyrs by the leading authority on John Foxe. Foxe’s marginalia are included with the texts, and King also provides an introduction, explanatory notes, bibliography, and glossaries of words, terms, and names.
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Morris, John, and John Mush. The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves. 3 vols. London: Burns and Oates, 1872–1877.
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A useful collection of primary documents regarding early modern Catholics from England and elsewhere, ranging from the martyrdom of Carthusian monks through the memoirs of recusant families.
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Pollen, J. H. Acts of English Martyrs Hitherto Unpublished. London: Burns and Oates, 1891.
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A dated edition, though still useful in telling the story in documents of English Catholic priests martyred in the late 16th and 17th centuries. Appendices detailing the beatification of the martyrs are included.
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Raphael, David. Expulsion 1492 Chronicles: An Anthology of Medieval Chronicles Relating to the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. North Hollywood, CA: Carmi, 1992.
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A rich collection of material, translated into English, that documents the Iberian expulsions from the authorities on down to the victims, and from the policy to its tragic implementation and consequences.
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MARTYROLOGIES
Modeling themselves on early Christian writers such as Eusebius and exploiting the possibilities of print culture, early modern martyrologists served an essential function in contributing to the identity-formation of the rival confessions, developing distinct confessional cultures, and hardening enmities between them. The period was in fact a golden age of martyrologies, with the 1550s and early 1560s witnessing a near-simultaneous and transnational explosion of the genre, in addition to the many pamphlets, treatises, and plays that also centered on martyrological themes and contemporary figures; visual depictions of martyrdom accompanied these martyrologies, from the woodcuts of Foxe to the elaborate engravings of Jan Luyken in the Martyrs Mirror. The following is a select list of the most renowned martyrologies to emerge from this period, with van Braght 1987 representing the end of the early modern martyrological trajectory with his narrative of the Anabaptist churches. The English godly are covered by Foxe 2006, while Rabus 1556 focuses on central Europe, and Crespin 2006 primarily covers the story from the French protestant perspective. Haemstede 1980, which covers the Dutch Calvinist church, is also important for the influence on other martyrologies. While many editions exist of these martyrologies—though not always in English--students should be aware of some of publications that may be heavily edited or redacted from the original.
Crespin, Jean. Le Livre des Martyrs. Translated from the Latin by Henri Bordier. Edited by Pierre Sicard. Oeuvres Complètes/Grégoire de Tours 4. Clermont-Ferrand, France: Éditions Paleo, 2006.
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The martyrology for the Reformed tradition, first written, compiled, edited, and printed by Crespin in 1554. As with van Braght, Rabus, and Foxe, Crespin includes martyrs from the early church, thus connecting his contemporary martyrs with the authentic and godly faithful of the past. Though many editions (with different titles) were published during his lifetime, a new annotated edition of Crespin is needed today; no English-language translations exist either.
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Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments: The Variorum Edition. hriOnline, Sheffield, 2006.
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The most important English protestant martyrology, compiled during the reign of Elizabeth, and describing the history of martyrs from the early church through the 16th century. Though Foxe includes the Waldensians and Lollards among the pantheon of the godly, most interesting are the treatments of the Protestant martyrs executed during the reign of Mary (1553–1558). Students should be aware of the many different editions published since Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.
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Haemstede, Adrian Cornelis van. De Gheschiedenisse ende den doodt der vromer Martelaren. Zug, Switzerland: IDC, 1980.
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A member of the Dutch Calvinist church, van Haemstede represents another earlier attempt to connect the early Christian martyrs to contemporary witnesses through an extensive and self-conscious narrative. Unlike Rabus, van Haemstede was also present at many executions, giving his martyrology a greater immediacy; his work is also significant for its influence on Foxe, Crespin, van Braght, and other martyrologists.
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Rabus, Ludwig. Der heiligen auβerwöhlten Gottes Zeugen Bekennern und Martyrern. Strassbourg, France: Becken, 1556.
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One of the earlier protestant martyrologies, written in 1552 by Rabus, a deacon on the staff of the Strassbourg cathedral. Modeling his work on Eusebius, Rabus compiled the stories of the earliest Christian martyrs up through his own time in eight volumes, emphasizing their confession of the faith rather than their deaths or dramatic personal sacrifices.
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van Braght, Thieleman. The Martyrs Mirror. 15th ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1987.
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Incorporating the earlier Mennonite martyrology entitled Het Offer des Heeren [The sacrifice unto the Lord], van Braght added narratives that told the story of the “suffering church” from the early years of Christianity through to the Mennonite martyrs of the early modern period. First published in 1938.
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Medieval Antecedents to Persecution
The contributions of medieval historians are important for any study of persecution, particularly as they influence approaches toward the early modern period. Moore 2007 is an essential source on the subject of a “persecuting society,” formed before and in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215; but his thesis has also been much debated, as evidenced by the collection in Laursen and Nederman 1998, which also treats the 16th and 17th centuries. Nirenberg 1996 has also complicated the framework provided by Moore, by examining the question of the boundaries between dominant and minority groups, and the function of violence in maintaining those boundaries. Meanwhile, Ray 2005 represents a more recent contribution to the subject of convivencia, or coexistence, in medieval Spain.
Laursen, John, and Cary J. Nederman. Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
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A collection of eleven essays that argues in favor of a religious toleration that existed in the Middle Ages as well as early modern period. Refuting the work of Moore and the term “persecuting society,” the authors re-examine the writings of Peter Abelard, John of Salisbury, and others, and the de facto tolerationist policies practiced in Poland and the Dutch Republic in the early modern period.
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Moore, R. I. Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250. 2d ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
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A seminal and much-debated work focusing on the “rise” of persecution in the 10th through the 13th centuries, but carrying an interpretive framework influential to the early modern period. Moore argues that a power-centralizing “persecuting society”—evidenced by the prosecution of Jews, lepers, heretics, and others--essentially resulted from “the decisions of princes and prelates” rather than the masses (p. 123).
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Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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An important work that analyzes the relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Aragon and the French Pyrenees region during the 14th century. Focusing on the Crusades, Holy Week processions, and other cases of ritualized violence, Nirenberg argues that the persecutory policies and violence displayed toward minorities by dominant groups was not intended for their destruction but served as a means to maintain boundaries between those groups.
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Ray, Jonathan. “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to MedievalConvivencia.” Jewish Social Studies 11.2 (2005): 1–18.
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An informative and historiographically informed essay reassessing the subject of convivencia, or coexistence, in the “tripartite society” of Christians, Jews, and Muslims living in medieval Spain. Instead of focusing on legal status toward Jews on the eve of the expulsion, Ray explores attitudes among the Sephardim themselves, especially toward convivencia.
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Inquisitions
Edward Peters once described the historiography of the inquisitions as composed of a body of legends and myths completely divorced from historical reality. Since the 1970s, and with the work of historians such as Kamen 1998, the traditional picture has been revised. The inquisition was certainly not an institution that followed “tolerant” principles, but the extent of its persecutory zeal has been softened by studies such as Tedeschi 1991 and Monter 1990 that examine its judicial and procedural foundations and “rational” basis. Students should also consult the essays in Henningsen and Tedeschi 1986 for the manner in which the inquisition may be studied through the lens of social history or other methodological and interpretive approaches, while Ginzburg 1992 provides a classic up-close study of the inquisition in action.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. 2d ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
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A seminal microhistorical study of a literate peasant and the unusual theological and philosophical views that brought him to the attention of the inquisition in Italy. Working closely with the trial records, Ginzburg explores the dynamics of legal justice, and the means by which one man proceeded through a system that offered him ample opportunity to explain and extricate himself, even if he was ultimately executed as a result of his beliefs.
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Henningsen, Gustav, and John Tedeschi, eds. The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Sources and Methods. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.
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A highly informative and indispensable collection of essays reflecting new archival research, methodologies, and approaches to the (primarily) Spanish and Italian inquisitions. Essays by important scholars point out the ways in which such documents can be read and used; also examined is the manner in which the archives can yield information regarding people’s larger religious beliefs, as well as the cultural transmissions evidenced by these texts.
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Kamen, Henry. The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1998.
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The classic “myth-exploding” history, though students should consult the latest, third edition, which acknowledges the state of inquisitorial studies since the first edition of 1965 appeared. Kamen’s contribution, from the beginning, has been a convincing reconsideration of the institution, arguing that the inquisition in Spain exerted a relatively marginal impact on daily life and intellectual culture.
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Monter, William. Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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A rich exploration of the “Aragonese century” of the Spanish Inquisition, from 1530 to 1630, when a wider range of offenders were prosecuted across Aragon and its possession states. Against the traditional and stereotypical position on the Inquisition (including an over-emphasis on the Castilian Inquisition), Monter argues for “rational” reasons behind the prosecutions, just as defendants themselves were active participants in their own cases.
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Tedeschi, John. The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991.
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Eleven collected articles that focus on the theory, procedure, and organization of the Roman Inquisition, ranging from statistical profiling of inquisitions over two centuries, the judicial and penal aspects of the institution, and manuals that delineate legal aspects of the process. Tedeschi is especially effective in discussing the various sources relating to the inquisition, and how special collections, state archives, letters, and other documents may be utilized by scholars.
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Persecuted Groups
Despite a greater emphasis in recent years on interacting confessional identities and religious pluralism in the early modern world, it still remains the case that thousands of individuals were targeted, pursued, imprisoned, tried, and executed on the basis of their faith alone. The Inquisition was established in 15th-century Spain to target converted Jews who were suspected of continuing the practice of their faith; the culmination of the process was their spectacular expulsion in 1492, ushering in a new age of Jewish history, and one marked by a turn toward mysticism or messianism as a way to cope with the devastations of a new exile. If women accused of sorcery had also long been a target of persecution, they experienced an entirely new level of judicial oppression in this period, for reasons that historians continue to debate heatedly. Among Christian groups, none were free of persecution, with Catholics experiencing official opprobrium in England, or martyrdom in New France or Asia. Calvinists too suffered, in France and the Low Countries, but perhaps no group was subject to more distrust and punishment than the Anabaptists, whose violent early history and later pacifistic and separatist tendencies rendered them permanently suspect to the authorities.
JEWS
Though Jews had been subject to popular violence and were officially cast out from states throughout the Middle Ages, their expulsion from Spain in 1492 represented a devastating persecutory event with implications that extended far into the future. The following is a sample of works that treat the subject from the perspective of persecution. Roth 1995 provides one of the more detailed recent examinations of the expulsion as well as the inquisition and conversions that preceded it, while Soyer 2007 looks at the phenomenon from the Portuguese perspective. Meanwhile, Teter 2005 explores the persecutory policies of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland toward the Jews, and Oberman 1984 provides a more general analysis of 16th-century reforming attitudes toward the Jews that fed into episodes of popular violence. Recent studies such as Hsia and Lehmann 1995 also stress the positive cultural, economic, social, and professional ties that existed between the religious groups in early modern Europe.
Hsia, R. Po-chia, and Hartmut Lehmann, eds. In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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Twenty-two essays and commentaries explore the subject of Jewish–Christian interactions, asserting that the term “ghetto” is misleading in conveying the complexity of a separation based on mutual consent. Anti-Jewish stereotyping rhetoric is also discussed as it pertained to political power.
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Oberman, Heiko A.. The Roots of Antisemitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation. Translated by James I. Porter. Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1984.
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An enlightening essay on the theme of anti-Judaism through the prism of 16th-century Protestant theologians and its place in the larger history of anti-Jewish sentiment. The Jewish-related writings of Luther are examined in depth, and placed within the context of the times, even if Luther went farther in equating Jews with the Turks and the Pope, and blamed them more vehemently for undermining the stability of German society.
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Roth, Norman. Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
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A more recent treatment of the ordeal of Jews in Spain, from attempts to convert them to Christianity (which often succeeded and were genuine, according to Roth), to the trials of the Inquisition, through to the expulsion. Useful appendices, as well as a glossary and index, complete this very detailed work, which attempts to provide a reconsideration of traditional interpretations of the converso or inquisition phenomenon.
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Soyer, François. The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496–7). Medieval Mediterranean 69. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
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A good study of the more overlooked persecution of Portuguese Jews and Muslims. Soyer argues that King Manuel agreed, after some pressure from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, to expel the Jews in order to secure “a long-lasting settlement with his powerful Castilian neighbours which would assure the King of peace at home and freedom to devote his attention abroad.”
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Teter, Magda. Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Teter describes the process by which the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, by no means the triumphant institution it was traditionally taken to be in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, targeted Jews (and heretics) as threats to its attempts to secure power. The result was an emergent Polish identity, influenced by the Church, which came to attach itself increasingly to a new kind of exclusive anti-Semitism that would extend through modernity.
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WITCHES
The scholarship on the early modern witch hunt is enormous; the following sample is intended to provide the student with basic studies of the subject in a broader persecutory context. Broedel 2003provides contextual analysis of an essential 15th-century text that laid the basis and conceptual framework for later prosecutions, while the essays in Anglo 1977 delineate the theoretical justification for the persecutions with an analysis of the work of Jean Bodin, Reginald Scot, and others. For the best treatment of the judicial procedural mechanisms that drove the witch hunt across the British Isles and the continent, Levack 1987 remains the standard account, while Sharpe 1996focuses on England, and Mandrou 1968 is a useful account of the role of the French state, or theparlements, in the prosecutory process.
Anglo, Sydney, ed. The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.
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Ten essays by important historians that focus on specific texts relating to witchcraft, from the Malleus Malificarum to Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft to Jean Bodin’s De la Demonomanie des sorciers. The intellectual influences that shaped these works are discussed, as is the general contextual background that gave rise to a worldview in which prosecution of witches became imperative.
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Broedel, Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
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One of the few works in English devoted solely to analysis of the infamous and formative (if idiosyncratic) work by the Dominicans Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Combining theological concerns with popular beliefs, the text—as Broedel demonstrates—succeeded in shaping early modern notions of witchcraft, and providing theological justification for the prosecutions that followed.
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Levack, Brian. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Longman, 1987.
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Still one of the best expositions on the witch hunt, particularly in its emphasis on the legal structures and procedures that undergirded the prosecutions that took place between 1450 and 1750. Levack examines criminal law and the judicial mechanisms in England and Scotland as well as on the continent, drawing out comparative analyses between the countries and their pursuit and treatment of those accused as witches.
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Mandrou, Robert. Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une analyse de pychologie historique. Collection civilisations et mentalités. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1968.
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An older yet still useful work that primarily traces the decline of witchcraft prosecution by the French parlements, beginning around 1640, while also treating at length their height in the late 16th century.
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Sharpe, J. A. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550–1750. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996.
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A good overview by the leading historian of crime, particularly strong on the chapters concerned with the process of accusation and apprehending, as well as trials and procedure.
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ANABAPTISTS
Anabaptists carried a unique position among persecuted groups in that they were universally loathed, with secular authorities not easily forgetting their radical and violent early years. Students should consult the now-classic works of Clasen 1972 and Stayer 1972 for the relationship between Anabaptists and the state, while Oyer 1964 provides a distillation of reformers’ attitudes toward these groups for the manner in which they formed and fed into common perceptions and persecutory policies. The Anabaptists or Mennonites also emphasized martyrdom and the “suffering church” more than did any other group, as Kreider 1984 and Dyck 1985 point out.
Clasen, Claus Peter. Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618: Switzerland, Austria, Moravia, South and Central Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
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A detailed study that parallels other sociohistorical works in examining the social and economic, as opposed to the exclusively theological or ecclesiastical, roots of Anabaptism. Clasen also examines the relationship between the state and the Anabaptists, and the persecutory consequences of the conflict between the two.
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Dyck, Cornelius J. “The Suffering Church in Anabaptism.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 59 (1985): 5–23.
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Delineates the centrality of suffering in the Anabaptist church, as to redeem and discipline the believer as a “soldier of Christ.” Martyrdom represented the height of this suffering, though it was not the only manifestation of godliness embraced by the early Mennonites.
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Kreider, Alan F. “ ‘The Servant Is Not Greater than His Master’: The Anabaptists and the Suffering Church.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 58 (1984): 5–29.
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A valuable and much-cited essay by a leading scholar that reasserts the importance of martyrs and a martyrological theology in shaping the historical development of the Mennonite Church.
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Oyer, John S. Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists: Luther, Melanchton, and Menius, and the Anabaptists of Central Germany. The Hague, The Netherlands: M. Nijhoff, 1964.
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The writings of the Lutheran reformers (and Luther himself) toward the radical reformers are examined at length in this work, as are the political and theological conflicts that emerged in the 1520s and later. As Oyer writes, “if Luther was conservative [regarding the Anabaptists], it was primarily because the radicals, the Anabaptists, wanted to go too far, at least in the early years” (p. 118).
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Stayer, James M.. Anabaptists and the Sword. Lawrence, KS: Coronado, 1972.
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One of the most thoroughly researched studies of 16th-century Anabaptists and their relationship to political power (and to the magisterial Protestants). The Swiss Brethren and upper German sects, as well as the Melchiorites, are examined, particularly with regard to their views on “taking the sword” (the “sword” being rule and authority in this world) or choosing nonresistant pacifism.
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PROTESTANTS
The Church’s ability to contain the rising heresy of Protestantism was dependent in large part on those local and state authorities who saw their interests, in extirpating dissidence, as synonymous with Rome“s. But persecutory policies were not always effective in suppressing Protestantism. Few leaders were more assuredly Catholic (if not entirely pope-friendly) than Charles V, for example, yet a number of political, economic, and foreign policy factors prevented him from controlling the imperial cities, or from exerting undue influence on Frederick the Wise, protector of Luther. Even in the Low Countries, where Charles and his son Philip set up a persecutory regime, Protestants and Anabaptists continued to exert their identity and resist authority, as Duke 2009 demonstrates. In France, Mentzer 1984 explores the case of the inquisition in Languedoc, but as Monter 1999 points out, even if the willingness was there, limits in the legal system continued to exert themselves. In the case of Venice, Martin 1993 describes the ultimate decline of Protestant groups, but they nevertheless hung on longer than usual, due in part perhaps to the more unique circumstances and geographical locale of the city. Finally, while it has been generally accepted that Mary Tudor’s execution of Protestants failed in that she ended up producing martyrs, Duffy 2009 provocatively argues that the policy was successful—an argument that convinces if one also accepts his other thesis that England still remained at this time predominantly Catholic.
Duffy, Eamon. Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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A thoroughgoing reassessment of the reign of Mary Tudor, important here for its treatment of the queen’s persecutory policies. According to Duffy’s (controversial) argument, the burnings of nearly three hundred Protestants have overshadowed the genuine attempts on the part of the queen and Reginald Pole to bring heretics back to the true church; those who were burned consisted of the most stubborn of zealots.
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Duke, Alastair. Dissident Identities in the Early Modern Low Countries. Edited by Judith Pollmann and Andrew Spicer. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
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One of the leading authorities on the Habsburg Netherlands explores the emergence of religious dissidents in the wake of the Reformation, and their growing opposition to and persecution by the regime. The religious repression of the inquisition in the years from 1521 to 1566 is examined at length, as is the manner in which Protestants (as well as Anabaptists) confronted it through pamphlets and other forms of resistance.
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Martin, John. Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City. Studies on the History of Society and Culture 16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
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An interesting and informative monograph exploring the rise and fall of Protestants (including Anabaptists) in early modern Venice, drawing on the archival sources as well as secondary material. The beliefs of these crypto-Protestants—who could range from patricians to journeymen—are discussed, as is the ultimate elimination of them by the authorities.
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Mentzer, Raymond. Heresy Proceedings in Languedoc, 1500–1560. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74. 5. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984.
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A useful work that emphasizes the litigation and procedure used to prosecute heretics during the “French inquisition,” particularly as it was “laicized” and directed by a monarchy and parlement that equated “religious division and political turmoil” (p. 159). Nearly one thousand cases between 1500 and 1560 are examined across various jurisdictions in Languedoc, with Mentzer following many cases from the preliminaries of a trial through the punishment.
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Monter, William. Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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An important work that revises and even overturns the traditional thesis that Protestants were increasingly persecuted in France as their movement grew over the course of the 16th century. Basing his arguments on archival evidence, Monter demonstrates that the French courts and judges were impeded in their persecutory attempts by political forces as well as the limitations of the legal system (including Protestant sympathizers within that system) as a whole.
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CATHOLICS
Catholics first experienced persecution in England during the reign of Henry VIII, even if martyrdom was confined to a relative few, in addition to the international cause célèbre that was Thomas More’s death. Elizabeth resumed the persecutory policies, in the form of executions (of priests) and fines (for recusants), but only after she was compelled to do so by her 1570 excommunication, releasing her Catholic subjects’ loyalties, and by the arrival of the Jesuits in the 1580s. Marotti 2005 provides an exploration of Catholics’ literary response to their condition, while Kilroy 2005 discusses the memorializing and textualizing afterlife of Campion, Elizabeth’s most noteworthy Jesuit martyr. The essays in Kaplan 2009 are also useful in their account of the survival strategies of minority Catholics in the Netherlands as well as England. The missionizing imperative of Jesuits especially was informed by a strong martyrological impulse, even if they did not undertake their mission to die—dead missionaries, even if martyred, serving a relatively limited function; still, Catholics’ beliefs were certainly tested in the farther reaches, as Campeau 1987 demonstrates with New France, and Hsia 1998 describes with regard to Asia.
Campeau, Lucien. La Mission des Jesuites chez les Hurons 1634–1650. Institutum Historicum Societatis Jesu. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1987.
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Basing his research on a deeper reading of the primary sources than other histories have provided, Campeau tells the story of the Huron mission, including the building of the priestly village residence of Sainte Marie, the invasion of the Iroquois, and the subsequent martyrdom (and later canonization) of the priests.
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Hsia R. Po-Chia. The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770. New Approaches to European History 12. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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A general survey of early modern Catholicism, but with a good chapter on the missions to Asia and America. Hsia argues that expansion into those territories was central to the history of the church in the period, with episodes of persecution and martyrdom serving only to strengthen the fortitude of the missionaries, and of believers back home.
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Kaplan, Benjamin J., Henk van Nierop, Judith Polmann, and Bob Moore, eds. Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570–1720. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press, 2009.
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A transnational collection of essays that examines the status of Catholic minority communities in Protestant England and the Dutch Republic. Moving beyond the traditional persecutory framework, authors describe the resistance and survival strategies of the groups as well as their different experiences and identity in the respective states.
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Kilroy, Gerard. Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
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Not a biography of Campion so much as a study of the martyr’s textual afterlife, this work nevertheless explores his letters from prison as well as his general literary and religious importance in the Catholic community of early modern England. Especially strong on the use of manuscripts and archival materials.
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Marotti, Arthur. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
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An important literary analysis of the many texts written by and about English Catholics, including Jesuits and recusants, as it recounts the story “of the (economic and other) persecution of a sizable and persistent body of believers holding on to the ‘old religion’ as it shifted to “a seigneurially centered, fragmented, and small minority church” (p. 132).
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Martyrdom
Scholars have long been interested in the phenomenon of martyrdom, but the “turn to religion” in the 1990s allowed martyrdom to be viewed on its own terms as a phenomenon that was impelled by faith alone, as opposed to other socio-economic factors. Gregory 1999 reinvigorated the study of martyrdom in the early modern period, particularly in its comparative approach—an approach, however, that neglected to mention the Irish martyrs studied by Tait 2003. More overlooked than Gregory has been the work of Kolb 1987, which explores the German perspective, while El Kenz 1997 addresses the culture of martyrdom in 16th-century France and Burschel 2004 that of the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Hickerson 2005, meanwhile, provides a good account of female martyrs and how they were shaped for posterity and their problematic gender subversions treated through the martyrology of John Foxe.
Burschel, Peter. Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: Zur Kultur des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit. Ancien Régime, Aufklärung und Revolution 35. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004.
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An excellent study of the culture of martyrdom that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as the author-editors such as Luwig Rabus and Thieleman van Braght who conveyed it. Particularly good on the collective and memorializing aspects of martyrdom; extensive bibliography and footnotes.
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El Kenz, David. Les Büchers du roi: La culture Protestante des martyres 1523–1572. Seyssel, France: Champs Vallon, 1997.
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A fine history exploring the persecution of Protestants and the making of martyrs in 16th-century France, from the emergence of Calvin and his followers through the period of Henry II and finally the religious wars up to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
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Gregory, Brad. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Harvard Historical Studies 134. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
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The most important recent study of “the collective dynamic of early modern martyrdom,” particularly useful for its comparative approach and its bringing in of the Anabaptists. England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands are all covered; perhaps most significant is its analysis of the “conflict of interpretations” between textual sources, with martyrologies and “counter-martyrologies” between Protestants and Catholics contending over what truly made a martyr.
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Hickerson, Megan. Making Women Martyrs in England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230510692Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A fine examination of women martyrs in 16th-century England, arguing in part that women—even bold or “problematic” women—were granted more agency and acceptance than previously assumed during the Reformation, as reflected in the work of John Foxe and John Bale.
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Kolb, Robert. For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987.
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Focusing on Ludwig Rabus’s eight-volume history of martyrs entitled Accounts of God’s Chosen Witnesses, Confessors, and Martyrs (1552), Kolb examines the emergence of Protestant martyrs (and martyrologies) in the 16th century, as well as Luther and Melancthon’s views of sainthood. Luther’s posthumous identity as a new kind of “Protestant saint”—based not on his behavior but on his exposition of God’s Word—is also explored. A valuable and overlooked study.
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Tait, Clodagh. “Adored for Saints: Catholic Martyrdom in Ireland c. 1560–1651.” Journal of Early Modern History 5 (2001): 128–159.
DOI: 10.1163/157006501X00087Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An outstanding essay exploring the unique phenomenon of martyrdom in Ireland, where persecution of a majority faith was pursued by a minority Protestant government. Tait traces the process by which Irish martyrs were apprehended, imprisoned, tried, executed, and memorialized; the author is especially good at contrasting the methods of persecution with those of Catholics in England, and at discussing the memory and the afterlife of martyrs in Ireland.
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Punishment and the Spectacle of Martyrdom
The spectacle of punishment and death was central to the drama of martyrdom, with the gallows or stake transformed into a theatrical site of spiritual triumph over unjust worldly power. The speeches, iconography, crowds, officials, preachers, and general symbolics that accompanied the martyr’s death have been the subject of a number of important studies, including works of art history. Of the latter, Merback 1999 provides a penetrating study that explores the connection between physical abjection and religious meaning. Nicholls 1988 is one of the earlier studies detailing the theatrics of martyrdom, with Sharpe 1985 contributing an important essay on last dying speeches and Monter 2002 delineating the numbers and meaning of heresy executions in reformation Europe. Finally,Lake and Questier 1996 offer one of the most cited pieces on the contested nature of the death site, while Spierenburg 1984 provides an interpretive essay and case history concerning execution and its meaning in Amsterdam.
Lake, Peter, and Michael Questier. “Agency, Appropriation, and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists, and the State in Early Modern England.” Past and Present 153 (1996): 64–108.
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A now-classic article that takes up the death-side drama of Catholics executed for treason. Rather than a case of the state exerting its power over the criminal, the execution carried “a whole range of gestures and counter-gestures, a serious set of exchanges between state, victim, and audience,” in which “Catholic victims of state power were also agents” in the process of their own theatricalized death.
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Merback, Mitchell. The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
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A brilliantly written exposition of the spectacle of pain and punishment that relates late medieval and early modern artistic renderings of the crucifixion—particularly of the two thieves alongside Jesus—to contemporary judicial practices.
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Monter, William. “Heresy Executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565.” In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation. Edited by Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner, 48–64. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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An important essay that provides an overview and “provisional census” of heresy executions across religious confessions, arguing that Roman Catholic ecclesiastical justice failed to punish heretics such as Luther, as secular justice assumed the role of heresy prosecution in other countries, thus contributing in great part to the process of early modern state-building.
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Nicholls, David. “The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation.” Past and Present 121 (1988): 49–73.
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Exploring the “three-act drama” of 16th-century heresy executions—public penitence, processions through the street, and execution-- Nicholls traces the manner in which authorities sought to symbolically expel the heretic from the community, before undertaking “total obliteration” (p. 121) of that heretic. Calvinist attitudes toward death and martyrdom are also examined in this earlier contribution to studies of the “theatre of martyrdom.”
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Sharpe, J. A. “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107.1 (1985): 144–167.
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A now-standard essay by the leading historian of crime, examining different aspects of the convention of the “last speech” in public executions. While Sharpe spends much of his piece on criminal executions, martyrological themes nevertheless appear in the cases of some criminals“ self-presentation, and much of his analysis can be applied to the more overtly religious executions of martyrs.
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Spierenburg, Petrus Cornelis. The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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A detailed study of executions in Amsterdam between 1650 and 1760, critiquing the penal paradigm of Michel Foucault while drawing on the work of Norbert Elias and others in attributing the decline of executions to shifts in mentalities toward human suffering as well as the development of the modern nation-state.
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Martyrologists and Martyrologies
The study of martyrologies has occurred at the intersection of religion and print culture, resulting in a lively and interdisciplinary body of scholarship. John Foxe has been the biggest beneficiary of this interest, though as Susan Wabuda points out, he can no longer be viewed as the sole author of theActs and Monuments. The British Academy’s John Foxe Project, which now publishes the Acts and Monuments (see under Martyrologies) online in all four editions released in Foxe’s lifetime, inspired three rich and innovative collections of essays, two of which (Highley and King 2002 and Loades 2007) appear here. Gilmont 1981 also reveals in its subject of Crespin an author-editor whose “godly” devotion to print parallels Foxe’s. Finally, Wood 1993 is useful for a broader view of martyrologies across the centuries and continents.
Gilmont, Jean-François. Jean Crespin: Un éditeur réformé du XVIe siècle. Travaux d’Humanisme et de Renaissance 186. Geneva, Switzerland: Droz, 1981.
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An important monograph examining the life and beliefs of Jean Crespin, his 1598 arrival in Geneva, and Histoire des Martyrers place in the print culture of early modern France. Gilmont also traces the many editions of Crespin’s work and discusses the literary genres and religious concerns as well as the illustrations and other paratext that informed it.
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Highley, Christopher, and John N. King, eds. John Foxe and His World. Papers from a conference held 29 April–2 May 1999 at Ohio State University. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.
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A collection of interdisciplinary essays based on a conference and contributing a number of significant understandings of the Acts and Monuments, from its visual material to its role in an emergent nationalism to its reception by Catholics. Authors include Patrick Collinson, Andrew Pedegree, and David Loades.
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Loades, John Foxe. John Foxe: An Historical Perspective. Papers presented at the 2nd John Foxe Colloquium, Jesus College, Oxford, 2–4 July 1997. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
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As with John Foxe and the English Reformation (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1997), which students should also consult, this work is based upon the British Academy’s John Foxe project—publisher of the online edition of the Acts and Monuments. Essays proceed to contextualize Foxe by situating his work in publishing history, or by analyzing his place within the bounds of older martyrologies.
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Wood, Diana., ed. Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Studies in Church History 30. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
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A huge-ranging collection of essays that extends from Western Europe to Kievan Russia and Japan. Many early modern articles are represented in this volume, including Susan Wabuda’s groundbreaking article on Foxe entitled “Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale and the Making of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.”
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Martyrdom and Literature
Though the devotional and religious aspects of early modern literature have been subject to a number of enlightening studies over the decades, with the exception of White 1963, relatively few scholars have specifically explored the manner in which martyrological themes infuse the work of writers such as Spenser or Milton. Knott 1993 was one of the first to do so, followed by Monta 2005, which coincides with a renewed focus on Catholic writings, best captured in the work of Alison Shell. The self-conscious construction of martyrs through the genre of the martyrology is also constructively examined by Dillon 2002, while Coats 1992 provides a fruitful comparative analysis of martyrologies in France, Geneva, and England.
Coats, Catharine Randall. Embodying the Word: Textual Resurrections in the Martyrological Narratives of Foxe, Crespin, de Bèze and d’Aubigné. Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts 4. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.
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Coats provides a comparative analysis of martyrologies and analyzes the quality that made them distinctly “Protestant,” namely, their upholding and embodying the notion of the Gospel Word in their narratives.
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Dillon, Anne. The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.
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A valuable exploration of the cult of martyrdom from Thomas More through Edmund Campion and the Elizabethan Jesuits. Dillon focuses on the re-emerging genre of the martyrology, as well as reaction on the continent to the English martyrs, and local responses by Protestants such as John Foxe. Robert Persons, and other Catholics, such as the Apellants, are also extensively discussed.
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Knott, John. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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A significant and well-written (and now unfortunately overlooked) study of the conceptions and expositions of suffering and martyrdom in the work of John Foxe, the Elizabethan separatists, John Milton, John Bunyan, and the Quaker George Fox. Knott’s discussions of Milton and Bunyan are particularly incisive, as is his discussion of the legacy and influence of Foxe. See pp. 84–116 in particular.
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Monta, Suzanna. Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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A comparative study of the representations and interpretations of martyrdom in early modern canonical texts, including the works of Spenser, Southwell, Shakespeare, and Donne. Particularly noteworthy are chapters examining the miraculous and marvelous in these works, and general analysis of the differences and commonalities between martyrologically oriented Protestant and Catholic texts.
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White, Helen Constance. Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.
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The classic work that examines the adaptation of hagiographic and martyrological literature to the literature and propaganda of Tudor England. The influence of late medieval hagiographies is examined, followed by an astute analysis of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the writings of Catholic martyrs such as Robert Southwell.
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