English Martyrs Research Articles

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

Utraquist Bohemia and the English Martyrs: An Uncommon Witness of Reform

The relationship between the Bohemian reform movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the events associated with the traditionally-nominated Reformations of the sixteenth century has been a much understudied topic amongst historians and theologians. There are a number of points of entry for comparison and analysis. One overlooked text is Pavel Bydžovský’s “Several Stories of English Martyrs (with Whom God Deigned to Decorate His Church Just Like the Heaven with Stars)” that was published in 1554. Bydžovský’s treatise, which has not been examined in modern times, offers a remarkable opportunity as an illustration of the little studied or understood Utraquist theological and ecclesiological position. This is displayed by Bydžovský’s sponsorship (especially that of Jan III, Popel z Lobkovic), his relationship to Catholicism and Lutheranism, and by his use of sources (especially, Venerable Bede, Reginald Pole, the Guildhall Report). Thus, the Bydžovský text is useful for the elaboration of the religious relationships that existed between Bohemia and England in the sixteenth century. The text further contributes an important witness to the theological and ecclesiastical via media represented by the Utraquist tradition between Rome on one hand and Wittenberg and Geneva on the other. This is most graphically displayed in what can only be characterized as a highly qualified allegiance to the papacy. This contribution to expanding knowledge around the definition and understanding of Reformation presents a full translation of Pavel Bydžovský’s treatise on the English Martyrs and this is preceded by a contextual commentary that endeavors to more meaningfully bring a forgotten text into the cutting edge of scholatship.

The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom and Pilgrimage in England and Wales, c. 1890–1914

The growth in Catholic pilgrimage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is widely acknowledged, but little attention has been paid to how and why many of the mass pilgrimages of the era began. This article will assess the contribution made by the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom to the growth of Catholic pilgrimage. After the Guild’s foundation in 1887, its leadership revived or restored pilgrimages to pre- and post-Reformation sites, and coordinated the movement of thousands of pilgrims across the country. This article offers an examination of how and why Guild leaders chose particular locations in the context of Marian Revivalism, papal interest in the English martyrs, defence of the Catholic faith, and late-nineteenth century medievalism. It argues that the Guild was pivotal in establishing some of England’s most famous post-Reformation pilgrimages. In doing so, it situates the work of the Guild in late nineteenth and early twentieth century religiosity, and demonstrates the pivotal nature of its work in establishing, developing, organising, and promoting some of the most important post-Reformation Catholic pilgrimages in Britain.

Books on Utopia Published in Italy in 2016 and During the First Semester of 2017

Books on Utopia Published in Italy in 2016 and During the First Semester of 2017

Dying for a Cause Other Than God: Exploring the Non-religious Meanings of Martyr and Shahīd

This paper looks into the non-religious meanings of English martyr and its near Arabic equivalent shahīd. It compares and contrasts them and provides an explication of each concept using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) method. The explications make use of simple, universal concepts, which renders the explications highly translatable into all languages, as well as accessible to cultural outsiders.

Michelangelo and the English Martyrs

Michelangelo and the English Martyrs

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution

The English Martyr: From Reformation to Revolution, by Alice Dailey

The English Martyr: From Reformation to Revolution, by Alice Dailey

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. By Alice Dailey. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. xv + 332 pp. $38.00 paper.

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. By Alice Dailey. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. xv + 332 pp. $38.00 paper. - Volume 83 Issue 3

Alice Dailey. The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern series. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. 352. $38.00 (paper).

Alice Dailey. The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern series. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. 352. $38.00 (paper).

Michelangelo and the English Martyrs by Anne Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: Michelangelo and the English Martyrs by Anne Dillon Bernadine Barnes Michelangelo and the English Martyrs. By Anne Dillon. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xxviii, 356. $134.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6447-5.) This engaging book deals with a broadsheet published in 1555. Engraved in Rome probably by Beatrizet, it visually and verbally reports on events that happened twenty years earlier in England during the reign of King Henry VIII. The Carthusian monks in London refused to acknowledge Henry’s role as head of the church in England and were condemned for treason. They were dragged from their charterhouse and hanged but cut down before they expired; they were then stripped, castrated, and disemboweled while still alive. Their bodies were dismembered and the parts publicly displayed. The murders caused an outcry at the time, but it was only in 1555 during the brief reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I that a public examination of the events was possible. The pope asked Cardinal Reginald Pole, the legate of the Holy See to England, to investigate the atrocities. The author proposes that Pole himself wrote the extensive text on the broadsheet, which is translated in an appendix. Martyrdom as an expression of faith is a powerful theme in Pole’s other writings, and the brutally straightforward depiction of the monks’ torture and deaths on the broadsheet—without reference to any later miracles—may well reflect Pole’s ideas. The imagery is complex, and the author proposes three readings that operate at the same time. Although the events depicted happened mostly in London, the backgrounds in the broadsheet recall Rome. Dillon suggests, quite convincingly, that the setting is meant to create a parallel between the Carthusian and the early Christian martyrs of Rome. The second reading comes from contemporary references—some of the onlookers to the executions can perhaps be associated with Henry VIII’s courtiers and staff. The third reading suggests that the monks were imitating Christ as they went to their deaths. A scaffold in the distance recalls the cross on Calvary, for example. The author sometimes undermines her argument by imposing consistency on the images. She states, for example, that all the figures are dressed in classical garments, but a few pages later she not only acknowledges that many are not but also uses those very figures as evidence for her second reading. Michelangelo is connected to the making of the broadsheet through his friendship with Pole. Pole’s involvement with artists in the 1540s is a neglected topic, and Dillon’s suggestion that he may have been an adviser to Michelangelo as he painted the Pauline Chapel frescoes deserves more study. The subject of St. Peter’s martyrdom in the Pauline chapel (the Donation of the Keys to Peter would be the more expected theme) is tied to Pole’s own emphasis on true martyrdom as the ultimate sign of faith. Since several of the figures on the broadsheet are in poses that reflect knowledge of the Pauline Chapel frescoes, Dillon would like to say that he provided drawings for the broadsheet. [End Page 613] In the end, it is not Michelangelo but one of his followers, Gaspar Beccera, who may have supplied drawings to the printmaker. Dillon’s method for making the attribution is circuitous and might be called circumstantial. Beccera is a Spanish artist who supplied drawings to Beatrizet for Juan Valverde’s anatomical book. At least one of the figures who is being disemboweled recalls some of those anatomical illustrations. The patron of the broadsheet is the Spanish Cardinal Juan Álvarez, who was also the patron of Valverde’s book. Dillon goes on to argue that the “actual recipient” of the broadsheet is Philip II, king of Spain and husband to Queen Mary of England. These Spanish connections are more convincing than the suggestion that Michelangelo was involved in the design. Whether or not Beccera saw Michelangelo’s drawings, it is difficult to believe that Michelangelo’s ideas about sola fide were transmitted through the broadsheet, especially since (as Dillon strongly argues) Michelangelo hid his beliefs from others. The tendency to overstatement in the quest for certainty is a problem throughout this...

The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution by Alice Dailey (review)

Reviewed by: The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution by Alice Dailey Gerard Kilroy The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. By Alice Dailey. [ReFormations Medieval and Early Modern.] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. xvi, 332. $38.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-268-02612-7; $26.00 e-book, ISBN 978-0-268-07778-5.) When Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador was saying Mass on March 24, 1980, witnesses say he flinched as he saw a gunman at the door of the church, just before a single, high-velocity bullet went cleanly through his chasuble and expanded inside his chest. When Jan Graffius came to examine his clothing under a [End Page 611] microscope, she found salt crystals, “the residue of a sudden and profuse sweat.” There was a moment of intense fear as the archbishop realized what was about to happen; yet he stayed at the altar. In 1996, Christian de Chergé and his fellow Cistercians decided to stay in their monastery at Tibhirine, Algeria. They were seized on the night of March 26 and beheaded on May 21. De Chergé left a testament that ends with forgiveness of the man who might murder him and the hope that, God willing, they would meet “like happy thieves” in paradise. Both Romero and the monks of Tibhirine bore witness to their faith before anyone told their story. It is necessary to say this, because the starting point of Alice Dailey’s book is that “the martyr is a retrospectively constructed figure created in and through literature” (p. 3); her interest is in the “dialogue between history and literary form” (p.2). Dailey challenges the “limitations of historicist readings of martyrology” (p. 5). Brad Gregory, through “inattention” to literary form, “reads martyrology as a transparent record of early modern Christian belief” (p. 5), whereas “genre structures the history that the genre in turn narrativises, and vice versa” (p. 5). Dailey surveys martyrdom across the confessional divide from the medieval models in the Golden Legend and John Foxe’s great Actes and Monuments (London, 1563) to St. Edmund Campion and King Charles I. Because martyrs rehearse a “paradigmatic story” (p.3), Acts and Monuments best fits her thesis. She is not the first to be gripped by the physical detail or convinced that Foxe allows “the hideous facts to speak for themselves” (p. 67). When she comes to the Catholic martyrs, she sees their deaths as the “fractured performance of conflicting scripts” (p. 114); Campion is forced into “a delicate medial space” (p. 107) between competing discourses of treason and martyrdom, having “failed in one of the necessary acts of Christian martyrdom, the confession of the tenets of the faith” (p. 108). This is despite the fact that, just before the cart was pulled away beneath his feet, Campion asked those Catholics present to join in reciting, “with as much fervour as they could,” theSymbolum Apostolorum: one of the oldest expressions of faith in the Church. Campion, at the moment of “his agony,” transformed the crowd around the scaffold into a community of faith. When Lord Charles Howard returned to the Court, he told Queen Elizabeth I that he thought the three papists “had died for no fault.” The queen, apparently stunned, said, “Is that so? Well, let those who are responsible look to it.” Howard was unconvinced by the treason narrative, and the queen disowned it, but Dailey sees Campion as “compromised” (p. 114) by his prayer for the queen. Campion revealed at his trial that he had told the queen that he accepted her authority and that the deposition of monarchs was not part of the potestas ordinata of the pope; it was certainly not an article of faith. Those who look at the early-modern period with postmodern detachment will like this book; others will find the idea that martyrdom is a literary genre, created posthumously, profoundly surprising. The past may be “a foreign country,” but these men and women sweated with fear, stood their ground, and bore witness with their blood, long before anyone constructed the narrative. Henry Walpole wrote his [End Page 612] fine poem, “Why doe I use my paper...

Michelangelo and the English Martyrs. By Anne Dillon. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2012. xxvii + 356. $134.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Michelangelo and the English Martyrs . By Anne Dillon . Farnham, U.K. : Ashgate , 2012. xxvii + 356. $134.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesFrom research into Roman broadsheet of 1555 Anne Dillon of Cavendish College, Cambridge, has produced an intriguing study of the intersection of Marian English propaganda, Tridentine Nicodemism, and late Italian Renaissance printing and art. The work consists of six scenes of English Carthusians undergoing grisly tortures and deaths at York and London (though the depicted settings are Roman) between 1535 and 1537. They suffered for having refused to accept Henry's headship of the Church of England. Beneath is text that describes each image and specifies the dates of the martyrdoms being depicted. Step by step, through nineteen compact chapters, Dillon unpacks the history and meaning of the images, moving between descriptive and interpretive modes. Along the way Dillon provides useful and well-constructed discussions on topics that underlay her analysis, such as the technology and business of printing broadsides, the presence and nature of Protestantism and other heretical undercurrents in mid-century Rome, and the state of anatomical illustration. The inclusion of 82 illustrations, including 28 in color, makes her points and conclusions come alive.The creation of the work occurred in the context of Mary Tudor's marriage to Spain's Philip II in July 1554 and the Catholic/Counter Reformation initiative to re-Catholicize England. The impetus came from Cardinal Juan Alvarez. The Spanish creator of the images, Gaspar Becerra, was student of Daniele da Volterra, himself pupil of Michelangelo. The book's title stems from this last connection, since Dillon finds in the broadsheet formal similarities to figures in Michelangelo's decoration of the Vatican's Capella Paolina and other Michelangelesque studies to which Becerra may have had access as Daniele's student. She even goes so far as to speculate that Michelangelo himself may have prepared studies for the broadsheet. Here the reader is reminded of Dan Brown's treatment of Leonardo. Dillon connects Michelangelo to the reform-minded English Cardinal Reginald Pole through their common Roman noble friend Vittoria Colonna. All three were Nicodemites, Dillon develops, believers in the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone who had to keep their beliefs hidden after their condemnation by the Council of Trent in 1547. The broadsheet, like the Capella itself, she claims, is Trojan horse for sola fide dissent by Michelangelo and other Nicodemite spirituali . Her encapsulation of this thesis refers to the inclusion of similar figures in both artistic works as a signal, code and the broadsheet breathtaking act of subversion (135).Dillon's is bold thesis and in developing it she presents much that is of value to the student of the period. …

Anne Dillon. Michelangelo and the English Martyrs.

Anne Dillon. Michelangelo and the English Martyrs.

Book Review: The English Martyr: From Reformation to Revolution

Book Review: The English Martyr: From Reformation to Revolution

:The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution

:<i>The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution</i>

Alice Dailey. The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. xv + 332 pp. $38. ISBN: 978–0–268–02612–7.

Alice Dailey. The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution. ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. xv + 332 pp. $38. ISBN: 978–0–268–02612–7. - Volume 66 Issue 4

Religious Networks in Action: The European Expansion of the Cult of St Thomas of Canterbury

‘Wonder not at our coming here, for unto you, Englishmen, God gave such a wondrous martyr, that he filleth nearly all the world with miracles.’ This admiring assertion, attributed to an archbishop and primate from the Nigros Monies – possibly Stephen, archbishop of Tarsus, which lies at the foot of. the Taurus Mountains in Armenia – provides a good introduction to the theme of this book, for it links Iceland, Canterbury and the eastern Mediterranean in a remarkable manner. The quotation comes from a lost life of St Thomas written in Latin by Robert of Cricklade, prior of St Frideswide in Oxford, who died in 1174; but it is known only from its transmission through one of the longest texts in Old Norse, the Thomas Saga Erkibyskups, compiled in Iceland through the thirteenth century from English Latin sources. This Anglo-Icelandic example, however, is only one part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw the cult of the ‘wondrous martyr’ established, and not only at the official level, across the whole of the West, from Norway to Sicily and from Portugal to Poland, before the end of the twelfth century. The English martyr was probably depicted among the array of saints on the West front of Trondheim cathedral; his mosaic image stands next to that of St Silvester in the apse behind the high altar in Monreale; the headquarters of the Portuguese Templars at Tomar had a chapel with a reliquary containing fragments of his brains and blood; and French monks from Morimond brought the cult to Sulejów in the diocese of Gneisno in 1177.

The Canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs: An Ecumenical Dilemma

In October 1970, amidst jubilant celebrations at St Peter's in Rome, Pope Paul VI canonised forty English and Welsh martyrs as saints. Auberon Waugh called it ‘the biggest moment for English Catholicism since Catholic emancipation in 1829’. It marked the culmination of a long campaign which had begun in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century under Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, shortly after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. By 1935 nearly two hundred Reformation martyrs had been beatified, but only two of these had been canonised, John Fisher and Thomas More—the first Englishmen to be made saints since John of Bridlington in 1401. After the hiatus of the Second World War, the cause was revived in 1960 seeking the canonisation of another forty English martyrs. All were Roman Catholics executed under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs or the Puritan Commonwealth, ranging from Carthusian monks who fell foul in 1535 of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, to seminary priests who were caught up in the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II in 1679. All but six of the forty had been hung, drawn and quartered, many of them on the gallows at Tyburn.

Un &lt;i&gt;Libellus Sancti Thome Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi&lt;/i&gt; (Archivo de la Catedral de Tuy, &lt;i&gt;Códice 1&lt;/i&gt;, ff. XIXv-XXVIIr)

The life, murder, and miracles attributed to Thomas Becket produced to a rich written production that spread and extensive literary output that was diffused very quickly across the whole of Latin Christendom. The extensive amount of space dedicated to the English martyr in Codex I of the Archive of Tuy Cathedral, a pre- Gothic hagiographic volume of saints lives, is triking; and its surprising also is the selection of texts no less arresting. It may be that the Together they constitute Tuy volume is a unique example of an unusual dossier, a libellus sancti Thome Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, which is introduced in the focus of this study.