Remembering the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Elizabethan England

Abstract

The state-sanctioned murder of thousands of French Protestants in August 1572 had a profound impact on Elizabethan England's political and religious imagination. The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was commemorated in prayers, pamphlets, poetry, and drama throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1593) is routinely read as the exemplary English response to this atrocity. This article recovers the diverse range of English Protestant texts remembering the Massacre in order to reexamine the discourse of English nationhood in its European context and to revisit our understanding of Marlowe's play. Drawing upon recent work on early modern memory, it explores how these various texts manipulate affect to advance particular religiopolitical agendas. These memories negotiate a complex entanglement of confessional and political allegiances, at once identifying with their French coreligionist and distancing the foreign violence from an insular England. This article demonstrates that the Massacre played a crucial role in the literary construction of the English Protestant nation. Ultimately, it identifies Marlowe's play as a radical transformation of English remembering of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.