Thursday, March 7, 2019

Contemporary Writing about the English Martyrs

I'm still reading this article by Susannah Brietz Monta, "Representing Martyrdom in Tudor England", available for free on the Oxford Handbooks site. I've printed it out for easier reading:

While the scope of English religious persecution pales in comparison with that of the continent, England’s several official changes of religion and its many Catholic martyrs make it a distinct case.9 Still, Tudor martyrdom ought not to be studied in isolation. Foxe’s first Latin martyrology, Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554), was influenced by continental Protestants, such as Matthias Flacius (Illyricus), and the Lutheran martyrologists known as the Magdeburg Centuriators; in turn, the martyrologists Adriaan van Haemstede, Ludwig Rabus, and Jean Crespin made use of the Commentarii.10 Much of Foxe’s second Latin martyrology, Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum (Basle, 1559), was incorporated into Crespin’s Actiones et monumenta martyrum (Geneva, 1560), the title of which influenced that of Foxe’s English martyrology, the Actes and Monuments.11 The fullest Catholic response to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was written in Latin for a broad audience; the Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholica in Anglia was first published in Trier in 1583 and in subsequent, expanded editions from 1588. Continental interest in English Catholic martyrs was significant.12Diego de Yepez, bishop of Taracona and confessor to Philip II, wrote a history of the English persecution, and numerous works in Latin and vernacular languages commemorated martyrs from Edmund Campion in 1581 to priests executed during the English Civil Wars in the 1640s.13
As affecting, dramatic offerings of religious testimony, martyrologies served important religious and polemical functions.14 Reformation-era martyrologies seek to establish continuity with Christianity’s foundational martyrdom, that of Christ, and to extend and shape subsequent Christian history. The construction of martyrdom concerns the writing of historical narrative, the boundaries of genre, the nature of living tradition, the power of exemplarity, the invocation of reading communities, and practices of imitatio, or imitation, in its literary and devotional forms. The making of martyrs thus depends upon both contemporary literary practices and religious convictions, as this essay hopes to show.

The writer of the essay has also published Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and an edition of Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune: A Catholic Response to the Faerie Queene (Manchester University Press, 2016).

I don't know how long this 25 page essay will be available for download and printing, so be forewarned. Also, please note the licensing restrictions!

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