‘The deformed imp of the devil’: John Foxe and the Protestant fashioning of the Catholic enemy

Abstract

John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (first English edition 1563) played a seminal role in the fashioning of a Protestant national identity. The nearly 300 victims who were burnt at the stake during the Marian Catholic years (1553-1558) were transformed in the crucible of the Foxeian narratives into heroes. Thanks to a reversal strategy the martyrs became victors in the ongoing fight against Antichrist and his supporters, the Catholics. Foxe’s purpose in this war for God was to create an enduring image of the enemy so as to fuel hatred to keep the fight going. The martyrologist left a long-lasting imprint in the English collective psyche as testified by the Catholic hysteria that raged during the post-Civil Wars era. The construction of an English Protestant identity was achieved thanks to a combination of self-definition and opposition. This construction partook in the pseudo-martyr debate: if both groups agreed on the definition and meaning of martyrdom, they disagreed on what they understood as true faith. Part of Foxe’s strategy to create the enemy image implied the analogical association between Protestants and apostolic and primitive figures, on the one hand, and between Catholics and evil forces through the commonplace recycling of biblical imagery that instantly evoked reminiscences of violence and barbarity, on the other. The martyrologist also resorted to the metaphor of the world as a stage to turn Catholics into puppets. The depriving of the opponents’ pith and life was brought to its logical consequence with the trope of animal-like creatures, eating the lambs of God. As expected in such a context of religious strife Foxe turned Catholics into cannibals. What was at stake with Foxe, as with all Protestant European narratives of the early modern period (Crespin, Van Haemstede), was the creation of an enemy image to survive to the persecutions that had taken such a toll, and was continuing to do so, onto their co-religionists. The discourses also naturally aimed at proselytizing as much as possible with familiar victims. With the fashioning of a “society of martyrs” Foxe constructed an “imagined community” (B. Anderson) whose mission was to weather the storms of violence and persecutions to uphold Christian values (the true Church) and national values (fighting against the Pope, the Spaniards and Mary, the semi-English Queen). Because the two sides of the religious divide shared the same roots uncanny resemblances can nevertheless be spotted, as with the frontispiece to Foxe’s work which creates a mirroring image between victims and victimizers. The erstwhile brothers had become ‘deformed imps of the devil’; what was familiar had become alien, other, external and frightening.