Gospelling Sisters "Goinge up and Downe": John Foxe and Disorderly Women

Abstract

John Foxe's Actes and Monuments is a formative text of English Protestantism, the mar tyrs described within it generally thought to have been intended to serve as prototype English Protestants. However, Foxe's female martyrs, by defying their husbands, fre quently subvert expectations for female virtue, which did not go unnoticed by Cath olic polemicists.While failing explicitly to defend his female martyrs' virtue, Foxe did not intend to advocate female disorder. By conflating his martyrs with the type of the true church described in the book of Revelation, he embedded patriarchal values in his descriptions of disorderly women who are wholly submissive to their heavenly spouse, their defiance of their earthly husbands signaling their marital subjection. Nevertheless, in a niilieu in which women's obedience to spousal authority reflected and was thought crucial to political and social order, women's marital disobedience had the potential to supply a model of political resistance for men and women. IN A POIGNANT ANECDOTE in his history of the Christian church, the Actes and Mon uments of these latter and perilous dayes (first published in 1563),John Foxe describes the arrest of the young Marian martyr Rose Allin by the heretic hunter Edmund Tyrrell. Tyrrell's villainy is sexualized by his language, his physical cruelty com pounded by his verbal attack: Then that cruell Tirrill taking the candell from her, held her wriest, and the burning candell under her hand, burning crosse wise over the backe thereof, so long till the very sinnowes crackt asunder.... In which tyme of his tyranny, he said often to her: why whore, wilt thou not cry? Thou young whore, wilt thou not cry? &c. Unto which alwayes she aunswered, that she had no cause, she thanked God, but rather to rejoyce. He had, she said, more cause to weepe then she, if he considered the matter well. In the end, when the sinnowes (as I sayd) brake that all the house heard them, he then thrust her from him violently, and sayd: baa strong whore, thou shameless beast, thou beastly whore. &c. with such lyke vile wordes.1 In Foxe's story of this young Protestant heroine, her persecutor, frustrated in the face of a woman's strength and defiance, rationalizes her behavior by recategorizing her as sexually deviant. This strategy exemplifies the association