Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (review)

Abstract

Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England. By Susannah Brietz Monta. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 245. $75.00.) Martyrdom accounts are intrinsically sensational, which has led to revived interest in them as scholars have become fascinated by relationship of literature and what Anglo-American (residually Puritan) culture calls the body. A century ago, Catholic apologist-historians gathered and discussed narratives of Early Modern English Catholic martyrs to assert dramatically importance of a persistent Catholic culture repressed in Whig historiography and to identify Catholicism as a source of resistance to dominant culture. On other hand, contemporary revived interest in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Actes and Monuments), a work that had enormous and formative cultural impact in early modern England, has helped to put topic of martyrdom back at center of historical and literary attention of early modern specialists. Recent work, such as Brad Gregory's Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (1999), which takes a comparative approach to Catholic and Protestant martyrologies, and Peter Lake's and Michael Questier's essay on 'Agency and Appropriation at Foot of Gallows: Catholics (and Puritans) Confront (and Constitute) English State (incorporated in The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists & Players in Post-Reformation England [2002]) have analyzed interesting cultural forces at play in situations of martyrdom and martyrological discourse. Like Gregory, Susannah Brietz Monta takes a comparative approach to topic and, like Lake and Questier, she considers issues of representation, political negotiation, and cross-confessional influences and ambiguities in martyrdom accounts and in literary works influenced by them. The strongest argument (convincingly) made in Monta's book is that conventions employed in Protestant and Catholic martyrdom discourse do not greatly differ. Although there were competing martyrologies that were actually read cross-confessionally and had different polemical and theological agendas implicit in them, they shared a basic set of conventions for representing those who were portrayed as dying for and bearing witness to their faith. In three lucid and informative chapters of part 1 of this study, Monta analyzes questions of representation and interpretation involved in production and reception of both Catholic and Protestant martyrdom accounts, their uses to confirm religious truth, and their presentations of marvelous or miraculous spectacles. Although Protestant depictions of providential marvels differ somewhat from Catholic emphasis on miraculous, and Protestants treasured printed texts that contained instructive accounts of martyrs while Catholics celebrated and used physical relics of their martyrs, Monta stresses similarities between two bodies of writing. In four chapters of part 2 of study, Monta cannily sets Protestant and Catholic literary texts against one another both to distinguish their confessional characteristics, but also to explore subtle, sometime ambiguous, ways martyrological literature impacted literary discourse. Thus, chapter four contrasts first book of Spenser's The Faerie Queene with its unusual handling of St. George legend with Anthony Copley's poetic rejoinder, A Fig for Fortune. While, Monta argues, Spenser uses emphasis on suffering to reform St. George legend and to synchronize ... [it] with Protestant apocalyptics (p. …