Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Spring 2003
In
his 1563 edition of Actes and Monuments, John Foxe lingers over the
death of Sir James Hales. Hales had been a supporter of Edward VI's
efforts to entrench ecclesiastical reform, and with Mary's ascension he
was thrown into prison and harassed into recanting his Protestant
loyalty. Foxe explains that after an attempted suicide Hales was
released; he then, "either for the greatnes of hys sorow, or for lacke
of reste and reason, or for lacke of good counsell, or for that he
would avoyd the necessity of hearing masse," drowned himself at his
estate in Kent.1 Since suicide represented not only the cardinal sin of
despair but was, as a contemporary legal scholar wrote, an "offence
against God, against the king, and against Nature," Hales's death
became a "propaganda disaster" for the Protestants. Conservative
churchmen took immediate advantage-Stephen Gardiner used Hales's case
to declare Protestantism a "doctrine of desperation" (1116) in Star
Chamber. Protestant historiographers thus felt some urgency in
refurbishing Hales's reputation; Raphael Holinshed put as positive a
spin as he could on Hales's death, while Foxe tried to induct him into
the fellowship of Protestant saints.2 Foxes approach to justifying
Hales's suicide is distinct from other Protestant apologists; rather
than placing responsibility on either Hales's lack of sound mind or his
coercion by his persecutors, Foxe attempts to justify the act of
suicide itself.3 Foxe cites early Christians who, while suffering under
the persecution of the early church, kept "their fayth and religion
unspoted" (1116) by suicide, asking rhetorically "how many examples
have we in the first persecutions of the Churche, of those men who
willynglye having killed & drowned themselves, onely upon an honest
cause ye bare out the matter, are yet registred in the workes of worthy
writers to their perpetuall prayse?" (1116).4 Foxe lays out multiple
examples taken from patristic texts (particularly Eusebius) of early
Christians who "did cast downe themselves headlong & brake their
owne neckes" so as "to avoyde suche horrible pollution of themselves"
through "sacrifice to heathen idols" (1116).
By aligning the
defense of true religious faith with the preservation of purity which
may be justly defended with self-destruction, Foxe extends his defense
of suicide to examples that conflate the defense of religious belief
with the defense of physical chastity. Foxe cites the "virgins of
Antioch... who to the end they might not defyle themselves with
uncleannesse, and with ydolatrie through the perswasion of their
mother, casting themselves headlong into a river together with their
mother, did fordo themselves, although not in the same water, yet after
the same manner of drowning, as this maister Hales did" (1116-17). Foxe
follows the virgins of Antioch with a story of "Brassila Dyrrachina"
who, when a "yong man" was "about to deflowre her ... fayned her selfe
to be a witche" and convinced her attacker that she would "geve him an
herb, which shoulde preserve him from all kynde of weapons." To prove
it, she "layde the herbe upon her owne throte" and had him test it; and
"so with ye losse of her life, her virginite was saved" (1117).5 Foxe
also tells of the "death of Sophronia a Matron of Rome, who when she
was required of Marentius the tiraunt to bee defiled... went into her
Chaumber, and with a weapon thrust her self through the brest and dyed"
(1117). And while these women were not directly defending their faith
with their suicides, Foxe concludes with the question, "who can tell,
whether master Hales, meaning to avoid the pollution of the Masse, did
likewise use the same kinde of death to kepe his faith undefiled,
wherof there ought to be as greate respect and greater to, then of the
chastitye of the bodye?" (1117). Foxe thus validates suicide as a
defense against a violation not of Christian spiritual virtue, but of
physical chastity,
And so, in Foxes argument, the hierarchical
tyranny of the Catholic oppression ceases to be an act of religious
persecution but is reconfigured as an act of erotic violence, exposing
a powerful erotic scripting of religious persecution that reverberates
throughout Foxes work. In this essay I examine this integration of
eroticism and suffering in early modern martyrology, an integration
which produces not only a historically specific form of interiority but
also a powerful mechanism for nonconformist evangelism. I will first
examine the figure of the woman martyr (Anne Askew in particular) who
is authorized to speak within a specifically early modern narrative
formulation of rape. I contend that the intersection of sexuality and
suffering upon the female body was vital to the development of the
activist, self-justifying, and self-contained individual who would
become the dominant model of Protestant subjectivity. This produced the
Protestant martyr-subject in discursive terms that were primarily
gendered female, even as most martyrs were men. I argue, therefore,
that as male bodies were placed within this narrative, in one sense the
feminizing erotics of rape infused reformist martyrology with the image
of the raped man, invoking the abject erotics of sodomy as a weapon
against Catholic persecution. Yet since early modern homoeroticism was
not simply analogous to heteroeroticism, I contend that the
libidinalized suffering of martyrs simultaneously energized the tropes
of male friendship, an erotic discourse which, while central to
dominant social, political and religious alliances, was often
discursively indistinguishable from sodomy.6 Foxes text thus points to
an interaction of "productive" and "disruptive" homoeroticisms that
work in cooperation to structure the male subject of martyrology. And
so, with the suffering body as the nexus of subject formation,
historically specific discourses of desire intersect to mold radically
modern versions of the female subject while at the same time generating
distinctly conservative forms of male homosocial alliance.
I. SUFFERING SUBJECTS
The
most extreme bodily pain is, without a doubt, central to Foxes work. In
fact, the dramatic display of martyrs suffering in relentlessly graphic
fashion is part of the realism that is one of the key distinctions
between the emergent form of Protestant martyrology and its medieval
Catholic forebears.' Traditional hagiographies had focused on the
martyr's release from pain, as in Eusebius,s church history when Bishop
Polycarp's singed flesh gave only the smell of incense, causing him to
be put to a comparatively painless death by the sword.8 But by the
sixteenth century, Protestant discomfort with the supernatural
disallows such miraculous intervention, and thus the new Protestant
poetics of martyrdom drives forward the physical experience of pain,
emphasizing the centrality of suffering for the subject of martyrology.
This is most evident in the gory death of Bishop Hooper, who burns very
slowly in an ill-lit fire (see figure 1):
In the which fire he
praied, with somwhat a loud voice: Lord Jesu have mercy upon me: Lorde
Jesu have mercy upon me. Lord Jesus receave my spirit. And they were
the last wordes he was herd to sound: but when he was blacke in the
mouth, and his tonge swollen, that he could not speake: yet his lippes
went, till they wer shrounke to the gommes: & he did knocke his
brest ith his handes untill one of his armes fel of, and then knocked
still with the other, what time the fat, water,and blond dropped out at
his fingers endes, until by renewing of the fire, his strength was
gonne, and his hand did cleave fast in knocking, to the yron upon his
brest, so immediately bowing forwarder, he yelded up his spirit. (1062)
Foxe directly compares Hooper's death with Polycarp's,
questioning who was more virtuous in his suffering, for
though
Policarpus, being set in the flame (as the story sayth) was kept by
miracle from the torment of the fyre, til he was stricken down with
weapon & so dispatched: yet Hoper by no less miracle armed with
patience, & servent spirite of Gods comfort, so quietly despised
the violence therof, as thoughe he had felt lyttle more then dyd
Policarpus in the fire flaming rounde about him.9
Foxe
implicitly attacks the early versions of martyrdom, emphasizing that
pain must be endured with patience, not erased, for martyrdom to be
spiritually valued. Hooper is not eased of his pain as is Polycarp; he
is given the strength to endure the suffering, "armed with patience,
& servent spirite of Gods comfort" in a way that is "no less a
miracle" than the fantastic interventions of Polycarp's death. It is
Hooper's great personal strength, augmented by God's grace, which makes
it seem "as though he had felt little more than did Polycarp."10 For
Foxe, the suffering of the body is the reality of martyrdom, a reality
which had in the past been clouded by the "famed additions of forged
miracles" of corrupt Catholic hagiographers; it is this personal
suffering that defines the acts of good men and gives authority to the
Protestant martyr.11
The extreme suffering of the martyr thus
becomes the condition of individualized and interiorized strength
manifested as "constancy," the central and oft repeated term used to
describe the Reformation martyr. This presents a problem for modern
historians of subjectivity, since it seems to defy the cultural
authority of spectacular punishment theorized by Michel Foucault as the
nexus of early modern social order.12 In a most disconcerting manner,
martyrdom inverts the Foucauldian model of disciplinary suffering; the
subject on the scaffold resists governing authority by translating
suffering from an effect of the subject's dissolution to that which
sanctions and empowers the subject, in opposition to the very governing
power which inflicts that suffering. And while the martyrological genre
does not debunk the disciplinary potential of the suffering body, the
importance of works such as Foxes calls for a revised examination of
the potential relationship between subjectivity and suffering.13 For
Foucault, the spectacle of the dismembered body defines the limits of
subjectivity, while martyrdom points to a different way of looking at
the relationship between suffering and subjectivity, as the tropes of
pain and violation are appropriated as constitutive to the subject.14
In
its resistance to Foucault's paradigm of early modern punishment, Foxes
text may seem a precursor of the bourgeois subject that emerges in the
eighteenth century when the individual invested with interiority and an
inner life becomes the privileged nexus of meaning. And while new
historicist and cultural materialist critics have argued that the
application of this model of interiority in the sixteenth century is
anachronistic, the excess of affect in Hooper's death expresses a form
of individualism that seems to resist the social, political, and even
ecclesiastical purposes of the text.15 And while this does not disable
the new historicist critique of the romanticization of subjectivity,
calling the concept of interiority illusory does not simply negate the
concept.16 Therefore I contend that for Foxe (and for much of early
modern culture) the interior truth of the subject becomes known through
pain which, as Hooper's death shows, emerges through an appropriately
theatrical expression of somatic violation. In essence, knowledge of
the subject's interiority emerges as the body is torn asunder.17 For
while Foxes work includes many martyrs who die without flinching, for
Hooper, Ridley, and a host of others, pain is not erased, nor is it
even mitigated by faith, as their screams for mercy attest.18 This is
not stoic fortitude, but real torment, experienced with savage
performativity. These key moments articulate a form of martyrdom and a
relationship between suffering and subjectivity quite distinct from
earlier medieval or later modern versions of martrydom, where the most
extreme suffering of the body marks not just the virtue but the
individualized essence of the subject.19
II. RAPE AND THE AUTHORITY OF WOMAN
But
what is the relationship between the articulation of an early modern
suffering subject and the gendering of that subject? Scholars have
begun to recognize the importance of gender in Protestant martyrology,
and arguably the most significant woman in English martyrology, both to
Elizabethans and to modern scholars, was Anne Askew, burned for heresy
in 1546.20 Askew's story, written by herself, was twice edited by the
two major arbiters of martyrology in Reformation England, first by John
Bale and then by Foxe, who reproduced Bale's edition (without Bale's
commentary) along with a detailed description of Askew's death. And
while Askew's narrative of her interrogation is primarily concerned
with the philosophical debate over central theological terms, as with
Foxes justification of Hales's suicide, an eroticized violence haunts
the margins of the text and emerges in the key dramatic details of her
narrative. In Askew's case her spectacular death is not the central
violence in her drama; for Askew, her suffering comes with her torture.
John King has asserted that Askew's account has particular power
because it is unusual in its exposure of "the full rigor of torture, an
unheard-of practice in Tudor England."21 Askew presents her torture on
the rack as being used not so much as a method for the discovery of
truth, but as an excessive, and extremely personal, act of violence.
She writes, with almost brutal austerity,
then they ded put me
on the racke, byause I confessed no ladyes nor gentyllwomen to be of my
opynyon, and theron they kepte me a longe tyme. And bycause I laye
styli and died not crye, my lorde Chauncellour and mastre Ryche, toke
peynes to racke me their owne handes, tyll I was nygh dead.22
Askew's
detail that her interrogators chose to torture her with "their owne
handes" implies that their excessive zealotry is driven by sadistic
pleasure. In his commentary on Askew's text, Bale explicates the scene
further:
A kynges hygh counseller, a Judge over lyfe and
deathe, yea, a lorde Chauncellour of a most noble realme, is now become
a most vyle slave for Antichrist, and a most cruell tormentoure.
Without al dyscressyon, honestye, or manhode, he casteth of hys gowne,
and taketh here Upon hym the most vyle offyce of a hangeman and pulleth
at the racke most vyllanouslye.23
This loss of "manhode"
suggests the traditional erotic formulation equating lack of control
with male heterosexual desire, and with rape in particular.24 Bale even
more directly than Askew equates Askew's torture with excessive desire,
thus emphasizing the moral weakness of Askew's persecutors. The writing
of the scene seizes the power from the torturers and places authority
with Askew, whose terse and controlled description is directly opposed
to her tormentors' loss of self-mastery. This authority and control as
a writer has made Askew particularly notable to scholars of early
modern culture, for not only does she defy the prohibitions on women's
speech but she also invests herself with the liberal ideals of
interiority, self-containment, and resistant self-justification; she
constructs herself as anachronistically modern.25
How, though,
does Askew's position within the larger genre of martyrology
participate in creating this "forum for [the] secularizing and
gendering [of] private identity"26 Frances Dolan has argued that while
women like Askew who were publicly executed in the early modern period
could gain authority to speak, the violence of execution carried
distinct erotic connotations: "the executioner would appear as a brutal
rapist, [and] the spectators as sadistic voyeurs." Therefore women
could maintain their authority to speak only as long as their "virtue .
. . [was] registered by means of their disembodiment."27 Indeed, as
Foxes defense of Hales shows, such a correspondence between
disciplinary violence and rape is vital to the writing of martyrdom.
The narratological formulation of rape in early modern culture, most
famously articulated in William Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece, was
more than a description of physical assault; rape was primarily about
an attempt at seduction (supported by a threat of force) which finally
fails as the narrative ends in violence.28 With this sort of structure,
rape becomes a potent metaphor for the theological struggle of the
martyr, as the very soul of the victim is assaulted-at first not
physically-but by tempting calls for the recantation of her heresy. And
in the rape narrative, as in martyrology, the final application of
physical violence spells an ironic victory for the victim, who defies
the physical threat of the violator with her eloquent resistance. And
as the victim (both of rape and martyrdom) rewrites the event (or is
written about), she/he is able to reconstruct her physical loss. So,
just as Lucrece defends her chastity and brings down the Tarquins's
rule by relating her story to her husband and his allies, it is through
the writing of her/his story that the martyr is able to maintain
her/his spiritual (if not physical) integrity even through the act of
violation and beyond her/his death.
I would suggest, then, (in
contrast to Dolan) that Askew's speech is not enabled because the
eroticization of her torture is suppressed, but that the perception of
her torture as rape authorizes her resistant voice. For while one may
not actually see Askew's torture, because of martyrology's reliance on
repeated spectacles of the suffering body, it is difficult not to
imagine her suffering at the lascivious hands of her tormentors. The
trope of martyrdom-as-rape demands that the fantasy of Askew's violated
body haunt her narrative; her sexualized body must remain at least
partially visible (while rigorously policed), emerging only at the
borders of the text. For example, the title page of her first
examination deploys, in bold print, verses from Proverbs 31: "Favoure
is desceytfull / and bewtye is a vayne thynge. But a woman that feareth
the lorde / is worthye to be praysed. She openeth her mouthe to wysdome
/ and in her language is the lawe of grace." So while it is clear that
a woman's potential sexuality, her "bewtye," must be contained by
"fear," it is also clear that if properly contained she may be
authorized to open her mouth "to wysdome," as Askew has done.29 This
productive tension between sexuality and its containment is manifested
in the representation of Askew's body on her title page (see figure 2).
Her body is composed and elegant; she stands almost as a Greek statue,
a classical model of Woman. She also prominently displays in her hands
a Bible tightly closed with clamps, visibly maintaining the physical
integrity of the Word just as she maintains the integrity of her body,
signifying her appropriately contained sexuality as described by the
quotation from Proverbs. Yet she is not sanitized of eroticism, and her
figure is still marked as both female and sexualized; her breasts are
clearly visible under her gown, and her hair threatens to burst out of
its containing ribbon. And the specter of erotic assault remains, for
partially concealed behind her skirt is the figure of a serpent adorned
with a leering papal head, denoting the insidious phallic force of the
persecution of the Antichrist that threatens to slither up her dress at
any moment. Here the iconic power of Woman, developed from highly
conservative discourses of patriarchal control of the female body,
becomes applicable not just to the idealized bodies of fantasy women,
but becomes accessible to women as a strategic move in the theological
and political debates of the Reformation.30 These women are able to
speak in an authorized voice, sanctioned by their eloquent textual
defense of their bodies, both physical and spiritual, which Askew
exploits to produce a sanctioned space for her own narrative.
III. SODOMY
Askew's
radical speaking voice shows how the feminized structure of resistant
suffering has an exceptional authority as a model of subjectivity, to
such an extent that it becomes part of the overarching generic formula
of Protestant martyrology. As Megan Matchinske has pointed out, the
Protestant martyrological subject that "will . . . become synonymous
with later Reformation paradigms for both men and women finds at least
one of its early voices in an institutionally framed definition of
acceptable, reformist, female exegesis."31 Bales introduction to
Askew's first examination compares her to Blandina, a central martyr of
the early church, as the "mother of martyrs... for her Christen
constancye," and so as a protomartyr for the entire Protestant martyr
tradition.32 One can see the gendered dynamic of male assault and
female defense developed in Askew's narrative repeated throughout Foxe;
its seduction leading to rape structure eerily parallels the repeated
struggle between the Catholic examiner and the soon to be martyr, which
John Knott has called the standard "script" of Protestant
martyrology.33 In a sense, all martyrs that follow Askew, the "mother
of martyrs," must utilize the specifically female tropes developed in
her protomartyrdom.
Most martyrs, though, were not women. So
while the erotic narrative of rape becomes most visible when women
become the objects of sexual violence, its form persists even as men
become the objects of that violence, disrupting the normative hierarchy
of male mastery defined by masculine penetration of women. Yet male
martyrs do not simply become women-in an early preface to Actes and
Monuments Foxe sets forth martyrs as "the true Conquerers of the world,
at whose hand we learne true manhoode"("The Utility of this History,"
22r). Certainly, as early modern England was a highly patriarchal
culture, the valorized injury of the martyr must be reserved for the
male body in order to secure the authority of martyrdom for men. And
thus the writing of male martyrs demands that the hierarchical violence
of rape be translated from the female body to the male body, a complex
shift which creates martyrdom as an overdetermined site for the
contradictory impulses of horror, pleasure, and devotion that circulate
around male homoeroticism in early modern culture.
In a certain
sense, the male subject of martyrdom is written in a manner parallel to
the defensive structure of the female martyr; throughout Actes and
Monuments the specter of sexual assault haunts male martyrs' suffering
just it does for women martyrs. This becomes most clear in episodes
involving Bishop Bonner, whose assaults upon the bodies of innocent men
and boys are elucidated as peculiarly excessive and are laced with
erotic tropes. In Bonner's examination of Thomas Tomkins in 1555, the
specter of erotic violence is rendered in terms distinctly parallel to
Askew's torture. Foxe shows Bonner's interest in Tomkins to be in
excess of his religious mission of conversion; Bonner takes an
inexplicably personal interest in Tomkin's torments just as Askew's
tormentors take with her: "Doct. Boner B. of London kept the sayd
Tomkins with hym in prison halfe a yeare. Duryng which tyme the sayd
Bishop was so rigorous unto hym"; Bonner "beat hym bitterly about the
face, whereby his face was swelled," and "tooke Tomkins by the fingers,
and held his hand directly over the flame, . . till the vaines shronke,
and the sinewes [burst]."34 And most significantly, before beginning
this torture Bonner "caused [Tomkins] beard to be shaven," which enacts
a powerfully eroticized degradation of the male subject to an
erotically subordinated position. The victim is stripped of his marker
of patriarchal authority and is rendered a potential object of male
sexual desire, not as a feminized figure but as a boy.35 Due to its
associations with classical precedence and its understood practice
amongst the elite and educated (and thus relatively protected) classes,
pederasty was one of the few visible forms of homoeroticism in early
modern culture.36 Yet even those most invested in such classical models
had limited tolerance for pedophilia, not because it eroticized male
relationships, but because the power dynamics of the relationship were
(ironically) too much like those between men with women.37 Michel de
Montaigne expresses this anxiety in his essay "On Friendship," where he
condemns the "Greek license" as an excessive and uncontrolled desire,
as a "furie" or "insolent and passionate violences" analogous to the
disruptive violence of heterosexual rape, thus paralleling Bonner's
pedophilia to the unrestrained desire exhibited by Askew's torturers.38
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Foxe
can thus be seen as caricaturing Bonner as manifesting a recognizably
disruptive form of homoerotic desire. A demonized, and particularly
Catholic, excess of desire thus becomes visible not just upon the
bodies of women, but upon the bodies of men as well. Foxe develops
Bonner's passions most famously in the text of Actes and Monuments that
surrounds the sensational woodcut "The Ryght Picture and True
Counterfyt of Boner, and his Crueltye, in Scourgynge of Goddes Saynctes
in his Orchard" (1689) (see figure 3). On the page below the woodcut
Foxe includes a short poem describing Bonner as a grotesque figure of
unnatural excess, declaring "natures woorke / is thus deformed now" in
Bonner, for he is a "Cannibal" with "belly lowen and head so swolne"
(1689).39 His corpulent belly, the poet declares, arises from his
unnatural appetite, for "it should appeare that blood feedes fat," and
that his "belly waxt with blood."40 Foxe follows this poem with
elaborate descriptions of Bonner's excessively violent "scourgynge[s]"
of young men and boys, analogous to his assault on Tomkins. Foxe tells
of Thomas Hinshaw, who Bonner had
knele against a long bench in
an arbour in his garden, where the said Thomas with out any enforcement
of his part, offred hymselfe to the beating, and did abide the fury of
the said Boner, so long as the fat panched bishop could endure with
breath, and till for wearinesse he was faine to cease, and geve place
to his shamefull act. (1691)
Bonner's beating of Hinshaw "till
for wearinesse he was fame to cease" mirrors a failure of
self-governance by Askew's interrogators, and suggests the exhaustion
of erotic expenditure. Foxe also tells the similar story of John Miles,
who Bonner "had ... incontinentlye to his Orchard" where he likewise
"skewed his cruelty upon him" (1650). And while there is no direct
declaration of Bonner's erotic desire, the OED gives a
fifteenth-century definition of "incontinentlye" as "wanting in self
restraint, chiefly with reference to sexual appetite," clarifying what
is "shamefull" about these acts." Foxes rendition of Bonner's desires
becomes more apparent in the woodcut's "ryght Picture and true
counterfeyt of Boner," which extends the erotic implications of
scourging well beyond what the text suggests.42 The male figure
suffering under Bonner's attentions is not just "knele[ing]," as the
text describes Hinshaw, but is on his hands and knees, and bares not
his back to be scourged, but his backside. Bonner is positioned
strategically behind his exposed victim with his codpiece notably
swollen beneath his engorged belly. The woodcut's powerful suggestion
of anal penetration, combined with the accretion of erotic implications
in the accompanying text, produces a quite distinct image of Bonner as
a violent sexual predator.
Foxe extends his description of
Bonner's excesses further in a story he recalls, "although it touche no
matter of religion, yet because it toucheth somthyge the nature and
disposition of that man" (1691). Foxe describes that while traveling
the Thames on a barge, Bonner and his chaplains "espyed a sort of yong
boyes swimming and washing themselves" (1691). Attracted to this scene,
Bonner seductively approaches the boys with "verye gentle language, and
fayre speache, untyl he had set his men a land" (1691). Then Bonner has
the men violently assault the boys, "beatyng some with nettels, drawing
some throw bushes of nettels naked" (1691), all as Bonner watches. The
very senselessness of this scene, with no theological or political
implications, but only insinuations of some corruption of "nature and
disposition," is the nadir of Foxes degradation of Bonner. The Catholic
persecution of the true church is reduced by its connection to the
"democratizing implications of lust and pain" that Debora Shuger sees
circulating in the early modern construction of the suffering
individual. As Shuger quotes Lear, "thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody
hand! / Why dost though lash that whore? Strip thy own back. / Thou
hotly lusts to use her in that kind / For which thou whipp'st her."43
For Lear, sexual desire becomes directly connected to suffering as that
which the subject defines her/himself against. Desire and suffering
together are the obscene and disruptive forces that must be resisted,
and Bonner, with his grotesque desires and deformed body with its
"belly lowen and head so swolne," becomes the transgressive and
carnivalesque form against which the classically contained subject of
martyrdom may be differentiated.44
This phobic deployment of
homoeroticism in Protestant martyrology is part of the legacy of
reformist anti-Catholic propaganda that equates Catholicism with
homoerotic transgression. Bale's work is notorious for his use of this
strategy, as when in his Acts of English Votaries Bale "takes some
popular and apparently innocuous stories (such as Gregory I's comments
on the beauty of English slave boys) and creates a sodomitical
subtext."45 Bale particularly focused on the homosocial space of the
monastery, which he made a synonym for homoerotic excess. As he
extravagantly accuses Catholic votaries, we see nothing in you but
haughtiness, vainglory, covetousness, pride, hatred, malice,
manslaughter, banquetings, gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, sedition,
idolatry, witch-craft, fornication, lechery, lewdness, besides your
filthy feats in the dark when women are not ready at hand.46
In
his commentary on Askew's examinations, Bale equates the Catholic
Church with "a spirytualte, called Sodome and Egypte [where votaries]
rejoyce in myschefes amonge themselves."47 This vague, sexualized
transgression that is isolated and hidden, this idea of "myschefes
among themselves," was a particularly potent weapon against monastic
orders, and it was quite likely that the politics surrounding the
dissolution of the monasteries motivated the development of antisodomy
laws in the 1530s.48
IV. FRIENDSHIP
This specific
demonization of sodomy, though, is not equivalent to modern homophobia;
recent scholarship has shown that there was no coherent discourse of
homoeroticism in early modern England, and so no single form of
homosexuality, or even the understanding of sexuality as a formative
aspect of subjectivity.49 "Sodomy" (or the "sodomite" as an entity), as
the closest contemporary term, existed as an only vague, surreal
horror; like Bale's "myschefes among themselves," sodomy was not even
identified with a specific set of sexual acts and could be associated
with any act that did not support procreation. Sodomy was not even
limited to the body-it could incorporate any subversive behavior such
as treason or heresy; it was "a seditious behavior that knew no
limit."50 Yet the very perception of sodomy as a limitless
transgression opened a space for differentiated articulations of
desire, as the excessive horror attached to the specter of sodomy
precluded any sort of self-identification as a sodomite.51 Accordingly,
there were a wide variety of erotic formulations that could exist
simultaneously with sodomy, without their mutual continuity being
recognized. Thus the deployment of sodomy in Protestant martyrology
does not exclude the text's enactment of authorized forms of
homoeroticism.
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As
Alan Bray has pointed out, the prohibited forms of homoeroticism that
fell under the rubric of sodomy were often functionally
indistinguishable from the eroticized discourse of male friendship
which was vital to the structures of politics and patronage in early
modern culture.52 Eroticized relationships between men were key to the
coherence of alliances, particularly as they were articulated in a
language of physical and spiritual intimacy that was not exclusively
platonic, but dependent upon a distinctly physical intimacy both in its
rhetoric and in actuality. This intimacy constituted a sanctioned
homoeroticism formulated (though not consciously) against the
disruptive, antisocial eroticism that composed sodomy.53 Of course, as
Mario DiGangi points out, "just because the discourse of male
friendship allowed a place for homoerotic desire does not mean that all
friendships were necessarily homoerotic." DiGangi goes on to point out
that the discourse of friendship reveals
a multiplicity of
possible social configurations, erotic investments, and sexual acts:
this multiplicity cannot be reduced to a uniform system of behavior. .
. .[But] it is nevertheless the case that early modern gender ideology
integrated orderly homoeroticism into friendship more seamlessly than
modern ideological formations, which more crisply distinguish
homoeroticism from friendship, sexual desire from social desire.54
There
was, then, a noteworthy opening within the relationships between men
that enabled particular forms of eroticism to emerge and generate
powerful affective relationships between men, opposed to (or at least
not recognized as) the disorderly desires of sodomy. So, within this
incoherent network of contrasting forms of homoeroticism, martyrdom's
eroticized suffering could be simultaneously equated both with sodomy,
which was to be resisted with abject horror, and the eroticized
intimacy of friendship, which was to be embraced as a constitutive
element of privileged male subjectivity.
A key distinction
between the erotics of sodomy and those of friendship was that, unlike
the "passionate violences" of the "Greeke license," the participants in
idealized friendship had a balanced and symmetrical exchange of desire.
As Jeffrey Masten argues, friendship was to be based in an "erotics of
similitude" where "gentlemen friends are identically constituted." So,
even while pederasty was condemned, the ideology of friendship
"valorizes another, interpenetrating version of sex between men."55 The
structure of martyrdom, though, was not one of symmetry or equality;
the related formulas of rape and sodomy are objectionable precisely
because they are hierarchical. But still, a desire to suffer this sort
of sexual violation was the primary drive of martyrdom; as Foxe put it,
martyrs were valorized for "offer[ing] their bodies willinglye" to the
"rough handling of their Tormentours" (23v), just as Hinshaw offered
himself willingly to Bonner's erotic attentions. This is the paradox
Dolan's work gestures toward; that is, that despite the erotic
significance surrounding public execution, male bodies were still
rendered visible objects of sexual violence on the scaffold. Because of
this, I argue, the eroticized violence of public execution does not
necessarily follow an exclusively heterosexual logic of active male
penetration and passive female penetrability. And so, in the spectacle
of the penetrated male body there is a potential for an erotic economy
that disrupts heteronormative gender hierarchy.56
This erotic
structure is particularly evoked in early modern devotional writings;
as Richard Rambuss has pointed out, in the poetic formulation of
devotion to the body of Christ in the works of writers such as Richard
Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert, erotic desire is powerfully
writ in the spectacle of the suffering male body. In these works
an
orifice or perforation in the body becomes the portal for devotional
access to Jesus: one thus enters him or is entered by him, and Christ
and Christian together are deluged in the salvific streams that from
the penetrated body. . . The position of ravisher and ravished,
penetrator and penetrated, can variously and successively be taken on
by male, female, and undecidably gendered devotional bodies as they are
rendered ecstatically expressive, devotionally stimulated.57
And
thus the generic structure of martyrology produces a homosocial/
homoerotic continuum that manages to evade the dangerous asymmetry that
might elicit the specters of sodomy and rape, while still maintaining
the hierarchical opposition that invests the martyr with his erotic
power as victim. Martyrs all share the same position in relation to
power-they are all simultaneously subjected to authority as the objects
of erotic violence, and so are "identically constituted" as male
friends, even as they take upon their bodies the eroticized penetration
of their persecutors. And so in Actes and Monuments the potential for a
counterheteronormative desire emerging from suffering allows martyrdom
to represent both the hierarchical violence of rape/sodomy and a
virtuous, yet still erotically charged, desire of symmetrical exchange.
It is together that martyrs suffer violation, and this violation is
their bond.
The desire for suffering fundamental to martyrology
manifests itself most evidently in Foxes writing of Thomas Bilney's
final evenings in prison. Bilney was one of the early Cambridge
reformers who had converted Hugh Latimer, and who had been a profound
influence on Matthew Parker. But he had become a problematic figure for
later reformers, and so Foxe, possibly to divert attention from more
unsettling issues, focuses on a particularly dramatic moment from just
before his death.58 In this episode, Foxe conceives of Bilney's
suffering not simply as a passive act of tolerance or resistance;
Bilney actively seeks out suffering, and even becomes his own
tormentor. As Foxe reports, Bilney "would manye times attempte to prove
the fire [by] holding his finger nye to the candle" (467). What is
significant about this scene is not just the religious zealousness it
expresses, but that Bilney is engaged in this martyrdom-in-- miniature
in the intimate space of his bedchamber, and with a very intimate
audience. For while Bilney was in prison, two church scholars had been
sent to try and draw him back to orthodoxy; yet while they "lay with
him in prison in disputation" it is not Bilney who is drawn back into
the fold but it is one of the doctors who is seduced to Bilney's
nonconformist beliefs: "Doct. Call by [the] worde of God through t'
holy ghost, and by Maister Bilneyes doctrine and godley life whereof he
had experience, was converted to Christ" (467). And in the woodcut that
accompanies the scene, it is the newly converted Dr. Call who is
looking on from the bed (with some curiosity) as Bilney burns his
finger; "said the doctor that lay with him, what do you master Bylney?
He answered nothing but trying my flesh by Gods grace, and burninge one
ioynt" (467, see figure 4). That the doctor "lay" with Bilney does not
demand, of course, that they be represented as physically "lying"
together; in the sixteenth century the word could signify "discussion"
or "intellectual debate." Yet to "lie" also had (and still has) sexual
connotation, and the woodcut does represent Bilney's and Call's
relationship in a way that suggests physical intimacy. Bilney and Call
are shown to be bedmates in their shared cell, their intimacy
emphasized by the curtain hung hastily over the barred window, as well
as the presence of domestic accoutrements like a pair of slippers and a
washing pitcher scattered around the room. This sort of physical
intimacy was a particularly important element of the institution of
male companionship as it is constructed in the writings of Montaigne,
Francis Bacon, Richard Braithwait, and others. As John Lyly describes
the intimate friendship of Euphues and Philautus,
they used not
only one board but one bed, one book (if so be it they thought not one
too many). Their friendship augmented every day, insomuch that the one
could not refrain the company of the other one minute. All things went
in common between them, which all men accounted commendable.59
Foxes
representational choice thus exposes the interplay between the
suffering of martyrdom (which Foxe has invested with such erotic
potential) and the physical intimacy of early modern male friendship.
The
self-inflicted nature of Bilney's suffering also has powerful erotic
resonance in early modern religious discourse. Self-torture echoes the
practice of scourging the flesh in flagellation, common in private
devotions of the early modern period. But by the sixteenth and early
seventeenth century in Protestant Europe, flagellation was becoming
associated with autoerotic pleasure; in a German medical treatise of
1629, flagellation is shown to act as a sexual stimulant, especially
for men. "That there are Persons who are stimulated to Venery by
Strokes of Rods, and worked Up into a Flame of Lust by Blows and that
the Part, which distinguishes us to be Men, should be raised by the
Charm of invigorating Lashes.1160 And in late sixteenthcentury English
anti-Catholic writing, flagellation was often seen as a suspect
solitary pleasure; in his undercover expose of supposedly debauched
practices in the seminary for exiled English Catholics in Rome, Anthony
Munday focuses on the elaborate physical penance performed by the
residence. Munday describes how one of his compatriots tries to seduce
him to the physical pleasures of selfflagellation:
he willed me
to trie it once, and I shoulde not finde any paine in it, but rather a
pleasure. For (quod he) if Christe had his fleshe rent and tome with
whips, his handes and feet nayled to the Crosse, his precious side
gored with a Launce, his head so pricked with a Crowne of thorne, that
his deere blood ran tilling downe his face, and all this was for you:
why should you feare to put your body to any torment, to recompence him
that hath done so much for you?61
This sort of anti-Catholic
propaganda may have influenced Foxe to alter his version of Bilney's
prison experience, for by the 1583 edition of Actes and Monuments
Bilney's act of self-torture has been moved out of the bedchamber and
into a public space. Bilney is no longer testing the flames before his
lone bedmate but while "sitting with his ... friendes in godly talke,"
and is making his display as part of a public pedagogical act, where
the listeners "tooke such sweete fruite therin, that thy caused the
whole sayd sentence to be fayre written in Tables, & some in theyr
bookes."62 It is possible that the erotic valences of Bilney's
self-burning became too easily identifiable with the erotics of
Catholic self-flagellation, and so it had to be placed in a communal
setting, with multiple witnesses to legitimate the wholesome intention
of the act.63
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But
in the 1563 edition, the erotics of suffering made visible in the image
of Bilney and Call's male friendship translates the demonized desires
of Catholic violence to an erotics of virtuous nonconformist suffering.
In the exchange between Bilney and Call, the physical intimacy of male
friendship inherent to the bedchamber has been transferred to the
spectacle of suffering, which, (following Rambuss's reading of
devotional poetry) has a significant affective power to conjoin the
devotional writer with the divine. The erotic language surrounding the
wounded body thus operates as a "technology of affect," to borrow Lisa
Jardine's term. Like the Erasmian epistolary rhetoric of intimacy
analyzed by Jardine, the rhetorical construction of suffering acts to
"convey passionate feelings, [and so] to create bonds of friendship"
among martyrs."This technology of affect is, as Jardine says, what
stands in for physical proximity, reproducing the physical intimacy
vital to male friendship; it is this intimacy that is generated in
Bilney and Call's cell. Bilney is not in direct physical contact with
Call, for he has left their mutual bed; but as Bilney lays his finger
to the flame, the virtuous martyr to be and his new convert are unified
not through direct physical union, but through the affective power of
Bilney's spectacular suffering.
The primary significance of
this eroticized structure of martyrology is that, like the bond of
friendship, it is a productive force. Male friendship was not simply an
emotional intimacy between men, but was, as Masten points out,
"constitutive of power relations in the [early modern] period," so much
so that the emergent model of companionate marriage, with its emphasis
on reproduction, was articulated in terms coterminous with the
structures of male friendship.65 In martyrdom, this logic of generative
friendship is deployed in support of the apostolic agenda of the
Protestant church. This is evident in one of the most famous moments in
Actes and Monuments, the communal death of Bishop Ridley and Father
Latimer. As they are brought to the stake, Foxe constructs an almost
romantic moment between the two men; as Ridley sees Latimer "with a
wonderous cheerful) looke, [he] ranne to hym, embraced, and kissed
hym." Together they go to the place of their burning and, as many
martyrs before and after, kiss the stake and pray. And "after they
arose, the one talked with the other a little whyle.... What they said,
I can learn of no man" (1769). And while this moment of martyrdom is
not as clearly invested with erotic implications as Hinshaw's scourging
or Bilney's bedchamber, it is the presence of the stake on which they
will suffer (Ridley most spectacularly) that centers the scene, both
producing and validating their intimacy. The moment thus becomes a
cooperative generation of transcendental truth, dramatically
articulated in the apostolic force of martyrdom's spectacle. As Latimer
declares at the stake to Ridley, "be of good comfort maister Ridley,
and play the man: wee shall this day light such a candle by Gods grace
in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out."66 The spectacle of
Ridley and Latimer's deaths thus transforms the fire of martyrdom into
the flame of truth, the truth of the Reformed church. And whereas the
rape narrative is gendered female, this production of truth is
explicitly gendered male by Latimer's heroic call to his partner in
suffering to "play the man." And, paralleling the logic of male
friendship, this manly suffering is not a singular suffering; it is a
collective masculine suffering, a suffering of the "we" who have the
power to "light such a candle." It is a masculine communion of martyrs
that shall produce truth, a masculine communion absolutely contingent
upon the leveling force of the eroticized "rough handling" of
tyranny.67
This apostolic homosocial intimacy reverberates
throughout Foxes text, propped against the tyrannical violence of papal
sodomy. This becomes clearly manifested in Foxes egalitarian fantasy of
spontaneous all-male Protestant communities being established in
English prisons during Mary's reign. Robert Smith's Newgate community
is a particularly good example of this male intimacy, where "caste in
an outwarde house wythin Newgate" (1260) the soon to be martyrs have
"Godlye conference within themselves with dayly prayinge and publyke
readynge, whiche they to theyr greate coumforte used in that house
together" (1260). This ad-hoc monastery has its own woodcut
illustration, where seven male figures are clustered intimately in a
sparsely furnished room, tightly closed in by walls (see figure 5).
This community is laced with intimate erotic valences as the figures
are positioned so closely that the two men in the bottom right corner
seem to have their legs intertwined, with the man in the right of the
frame having his hand placed delicately on the other man's left knee.
Thus the very male intimacy that generated Protestant suspicion of
sexual "myschife" in Catholic monasteries is not only maintained, but
is praised as an ideal form for a virtuous reformed church. It is clear
that for Smith's congregation, the antisodomy propaganda of Bale and
others does not disrupt the practical deployment of affective intimacy
between men in the establishment of the true church.
V. "RAVISHED WITH ZEALE"-THE THEATRE OF MARTYRS
So,
as Smith's gathering in Newgate shows, the technology of affect
produced in the eroticized spectacle of suffering is a powerful
mechanism for constituting the intimate homosocial communities of the
reformed church. How, though, does this mechanism operate in the
spectacle of the martyr suffering alone, as many martyrs do, without a
community formed around them? How does a death like that of Bishop
Hooper fit into this matrix of intimacy modeled by Ridley and Latimer
or the Newgate congregation? I contend that the power of the spectacle
of suffering to produce alliance is not limited to the formulation of
relationships within the narrative. A martyrology's function, and not
just for Foxe, is an evangelistic one, it is not simply to construct an
ideological figuration of subjectivity. The story of the martyrs'
suffering is designed to testify to the true faith and advocates its
adoption; it is thus crucial to Foxes project that his text itself
inspires imitation beyond itself. Foxe describes his project as
didactic, where the reader is to learn "not onelye what in those dayes
was done, but also what ought nowe to be followed" ("The Utility of
this History," 22r). As Foxe writes, after witnessing martyrs offer up
their bodies "to the rough handling of their tormentors ... is it so
great a matter then for our part, to mortifie our flesh?" ("The Utility
of this History," 22r). Martyrs are to inspire imitation, to make more
martyrs. This is the primary role of a martyrdom like Hooper's, where
the affective power of his dramatic suffering is not targeted to an
audience within the text, but is designed to reach out to the reader
through its dramatic power and draw them to the true faith of the
reformed church.
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The
text is designed to stimulate such action not through rational
argument, but through the affective power of witnessing the spectacle
of suffering that gains its affective power over the audience (that is,
the reader) by means of its theatrical presentation.66 It is, of
course, commonly known that early modern nonconformist ethos included a
profound suspicion of the theatre. But as Ritchie Kendall has argued,
despite the stated antipathy to dramatic forms, "drama touched the raw
nerve of noncomformity," and theatricality acted as a primary mechanism
for representing the power of individuated nonconformist struggle for
faith.69 The Puritan passion for martyrology is a powerful testament to
this argument, for the performance of martyrdom is, in its essence,
dramatic.70 And Foxe, like other nonconformist writers, emphasizes the
dramatic elements of the form, portraying highly dramatic
interrogations (often in dialogue form) and laying out the martyrs'
performances on the scaffold for maximum dramatic effect.71
Even
though "the works of the nonconformist spirit almost invariably stop
short of the stage," the affective power of theatrical representation
to act upon its audience, even in written form, is not disabled.72 And
puritan writers conceived of that power as an erotic force, a demonic,
invasive threat that violates the very souls of the witness. John
Northbrooke stated that "I am persuaded that Satan hath not a more
speedie way and fitter schoole to work and teach his desire, to bring
men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthie lustes of
wicked whoredome, that those places and playses, and theaters are."73
And William Prynne declared "[s]tage-Playes devirginate unmarried
persons, especially beautifull, tender Virgins who resort unto them."74
Theatre itself is conceived of as a potential rapist, able to force
itself upon the victim and coerce him/her to erotic acts. Laura Levine
points out that antitheatrical writers saw theater, in its classical
origins, as a mechanism for making women vulnerable to men, and so
"theater [was] founded on and in rape." For Levine, "theater itself
comes to be synonymous with its origins, for pamphleteers conceive of
it as a kind of rape of the mind, a'ravishing' of the senses."75
And
so, for Foxe and his fellow Protestants, the theatricality of
martyrological narrative mimics the violence exercised by the
tormentors themselves; as the Catholic persecutors exercise their
unnatural desires upon the bodies of the martyrs, in turn the
horrifying spectacle of the martyrs' torment ravish the audience. But
as with the shift from Catholic sodomy to virtuous homoerotic
friendship, this erotic violence becomes, for reformist writers, a
righteous eroticism. Affective erotic power is transferred from the
satanic and disorderly to the didactic and evangelistic, creating and
expanding the nascent "elect nation" of English Protestantism.76 In the
schema of martyrological representation, then, it is not necessary to
actually suffer physical violence to become ensconced in the erotics of
martyrdom-one simply must be part of the audience of martyrdom. And so
the logic of Hooper's dramatic death becomes clearer, for it is
structured to enclose the reader in the moment. In the horrifyingly
explicit woodcut, Hooper does not look up to the divine, nor does he
look to other figures in the frame. His direct stare meets the reader's
gaze with firm conviction. His suffering reaches out to ravish the
reader's senses with the sublime display of wounds and draw her/him
into his suffering. As Foxes contemporary Meredith Hanmer writes, in
his introduction to his 1577 translation of Eusebius church history,
If
we stande upon the Theater of Martyrs, and there behold the valiant
wrastlers, and invincible champions of Christ lesu, how can we chuse
but be ravished with Zeale when we see the professors of truth torn in
peeces by wilde beastes, crucified, beheaded, stoned, stifled, beaten
to death with cudgels.77
Here the martyrological text takes the
place of the persecutor, and the reader becomes the ravished victim.
The theatrical spectacle renders the spectator (or the reader)
powerless before it, and so the dramatic writing of martyrdom
reproduces within the reading subject the very ravishment it displays,
extending the desires of the text beyond its own bounds and into the
souls of its audience.
Auburn University
[Footnote] |
An
earlier version of this essay was presented at "John Foxe and His
World; An Interdisciplinary Colloquium," held at the Ohio State
University in April 1999. 1 would like to thank Megan Matchinske, Chris
Frilingos, and Hilary E. Wyss for their insightful readings and patient
suggestions. |
|
1
John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), 1116. Hereafter cited
parenthetically by page number. All citations are from the 1563
editions unless otherwise specified. |
2
M. Dalton, The Country Justice (London, 1626), 234, quoted in Michael
MacDonald and Terence Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 15, 62, 63. MacDonald and
Murphy assert that while there was a formal abhorrence of suicide in
medieval culture as well as in the eighteenth century,
sixteenth-century England saw a particularly severe enforcement of
suicide as both a religious and secular crime. The difficult Foxe has
defending Hales becomes evident with the disappearance of Hales from
Actes and Monuments by the 1583 edition. |
|
3
John Hooper, in his "A Brief Treaties Respecting Judge Hales," places
the responsibility for Hales's suicide on his recantation, which,
Hooper contends, left Hales vulnerable to satanic influence, as a
"new-made Christ is not able to keep the devil away" (in The Later
Writings of John Hooper, ed. C. Nevinson, Parker Society [Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1852], 374), quoted in MacDonald and Murphy, 62.
Although he does note the stress caused by Hales's jailers'
psychological harassment, Foxe does not foreground the argument that
Hales was non compos mentis at the time of his death. |
4
John Donne makes visible the precarious connection between martyrdom
and suicide as he cites multiple early church martyrs who become
"enforcers of their owne Martyrdome" to support his paradoxical defense
of suicide (Biathanatos [New York: Fasimile Text Society, 1930], 64). |
5
Christopher Marlowe also adapted this story in act 4 of 11 Tamburlain
the Great, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and
Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995). |
|
6
Alan Bray delineates the conflation of friendship and sodomy in his
"Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan
England," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 40-61. Many scholars have expanded upon his
work, most eloquently Jeffrey Masten in Textual Intercourse:
Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). By engaging with male-male
erotic relationships as discursively distinct from male-female
relationships, my argument follows the work of these scholars, as well
as Valerie Traub's call to recognize that "gender, sexuality, and
subjectivity are separate but intersecting discourses" (Desire and
Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama [New York:
Routledge, 1992, 102). Yet I also contend that recognizing the
structural continuities between early modern heteroerotic and
homoerotic economies of desire is crucial to understanding the
circulation of sexuality in Protestant martyrology. |
|
7
See John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature
1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); and Helen C. White,
Tudor Books of Martyrs (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1963). |
8 The Auncient Ecclesiasticall
Histories of the First Six Hundred Yeares
After Christ, trans. Meredith Hanmer (London, 1577), 65-68. |
9 Foxe adds this comparison between
Hooper and Eusebius in the 1583
edition (1502). The description of Hooper's death remains fundamentally
unchanged between the editions. |
10 My emphasis. |
|
11 This quotation is from the 1583
edition describing the death of
Clement, about whom Foxe says "forasmuch as I finde of his Martyrdome
no firme relation in the auncient authors, but onely in such new
wirters of latter tyres, which are wont to painte out the lives and
histores of good men, with famed additions of forged miracles, therfore
I count the same of lesse credite, as I do also certaine Decretail
Epistles, untruely (as may seeme) ascribed and intituled to his name"
(38). |
12 Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, 1979). Foucault briefly discusses the
instability of public execution, primarily in terms of its popular
festive potential; he argues that "in these executions, which ought to
show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect
of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and
criminals transformed into heroes" (61). For discussions of the
troubles surrounding the scaffold, see Thomas Laqueur's "Crowds,
Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First
Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone,
ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 305-55; Peter Linebaugh, "The Tyburn Riot
against the Surgeons," in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in
Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G.
Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975),
65117. |
|
13
Janel Mueller's "Pain, Persecution, and the Construction of Selfhood in
Foxes Actes and Monunwnts" offers a useful reading of Foxes uses of the
body in pain, emphasizing the importance of the suffering subject to
early modern theology. But she sees the structures of martyrdom as
offering a "decisive challenge to reading the early modern body as a
locus of sexualized pleasure" (Religion and Culture in Renaissance
England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger [Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press], 162). I contend, following Richard Rambuss, that
representations of suffering do not necessarily exclude eroticism; see
his response to Caroline Walker Bynum in Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, 1998), 42-49. |
|
14 The
perception of pain as an element that only acts negatively against the
subject recurs in Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). Scarry
focuses primarily on torture, which limits the scope of her
investigation; she does not investigate other cultural fields (from
martyrdom to modern S/M subcultures) where suffering is central to the
production of the subject. Most other academic works on pain follow
this logic, such as Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise
Elliott Wallace, J. A. Cadden, and S. W. Cadden (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1993); David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley:
California Univ, Press, 1991); and Morris, Pain as Human Experience: An
Anthropological Perspective, ed. Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Paul E.
Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: California Univ.
Press, 1992). Psychoanalytic theory has offered a useful approach to
the question of identity and the eroticization of suffering, most
recently in Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 23 (1987):
197-222; and Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New
York: Routledge, 1992). |
|
15
In particular, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the early Protestant
structure of constancy, the form of interiority so clearly manifest in
Foxe, is not analogous to the individualized and private virtue which
would emerge with the intense autobiographical self-scrutiny of
seventeenth-century Puritans. For Greenblatt, the inner constancy of
the martyr was produced through theatrical spectacle, as the early |
|
Tudor
nonconformist was a subject produced by a performative repetition of
narrative models or archetypes, a "creature of the book" that demanded
a communal or public representation. See "The Word of God in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 74-114. See also Francis Barker, The
Tremulous Private Body (New York: Methuen, 1984); and Goldberg, James I
and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1983). The uses to which Foxes text is put throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth century exhibit the ideological instability
of martyrology. Acres and Monuments at its inception was profoundly
orthodox, with clear high church and monarchical sympathies. But by the
early seventeenth century the text was deemed by the status quo to be
threatening enough to cause Laud to refuse a license for a new edition.
By that point, Foxes work had become vital to radical nonconfomists as
a foundational text supporting the resistance to centralized authority
in favor of individual conscience. So, despite his declaration of
allegiance to centralized ideologies, Foxe produced a text that
resisted enclosure within a hierarchical ordering of church and state. |
|
16
As Katherine Eisaman Maus eloquently puts it, new historicist critique
"often seems to assume that once this dependence [on social context] is
pointed out, inwardness simply vaporizes, like the Wicked Witch of the
West under Dorothy's bucket of water" (Inwardness and Theater in the
English Renaissance [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995], 28). |
17
For a discussion of the truth found in the violation of the body see
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). |
18
Bishop Ridley's death, like Hooper's, is paralleled with Polycarp's in
a way that emphasizes the reality of his suffering. Rather than
refusing to be bound to the stake as did Polycarp, Ridley calls "good
fellowe knocke it in harde for the fleshe will have his course" (1378).
And then as the badly lit fire slowly burns, Ridley voices a tragic
parody of the miracle that kept Polycarp from burning, crying "lette
the fier come unot me, I cannot burne" (1378). |
|
19
Elizabeth Hanson has argued for an early modern ethos of truth in
suffering in her interpretation of the legalization of torture in the
late sixteenth century, when the tortured body became the contested
site of identity as "Elizabethan torturers sought to establish
discursive hegemony by forcibly appropriating their victims' speech.
Their victims, in struggling to maintain religious discourse in the
torture chamber, sought the same end by holding their enemies'
discourse at the frontier marked by torture" ("Torture and Truth in
Renaissance England," Representations 34 [Spring 1991]: 61). Debora
Shuger has also recognized the importance of suffering to constructing
the truth of self-authorized subjectivity; she sees the construction of
characters with "psychic depth" in Shakespeare as part of the
appropriation of religious structures of subjectivity to the realm of
the secular, which "demarcate[s] a generic selfhood distinct from one's
public, social identity-a selfhood already present in medieval
religious texts but in Shakespeare for the first time transposed into
secular, literary forms" ("Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects:
Shakespeare and Christianity," in Religion, Literature, and Politics in
PostReformation England 1540-1688, ed. Donna B. Hamilton and Richard
Strier [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press], 59). |
20
For investigations on the importance of Askew, see Elaine B. Beilin,
Redeeming Eve: Women Writers in the English Renaissance (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, |
|
1987);
and Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern
England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1998). |
21 John King,
English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant
Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 25. Torture had
been outlawed in England since the twelfth century, but came back into
use briefly with the pursuit of Jesuits in the later part of
Elizabeth's reign (see Hanson). My concern is not with the specific
function of torture, but the erotic inflections surrounding
representations of torture. |
|
22 Anne Askew, The Examinations of
Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996),
127-28. |
23 Askew, 128. |
24
Bruce Smith states that the equation of loss of control with
heterosexual desire was "a standard topos in Renaissance moral
philosophy." Homosexuality in Shakespeare's England (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1991), 35. |
25 Matchinske, 24-52. 2 Matchinske,
29. |
|
27 Frances Dolan, "`Gentlemen, I Have
One More Thing To Say': Women on
Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680," Modern Philology 92 (1994): 162. |
28
For a discussion of the importance of the story of Lucrece's rape to
Renaissance humanists, not only as it originates in Livy but as it is
rewritten multiple times (Shakespeare's is only the best known English
version), see Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucrece and
the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989). Jed
argues that Lucrece's rape was "a paradigmatic component of all
narratives of liberation" (49), and that the violence exercised on
Lucrece legitimized the establishment of republican government not just
for ancient Rome but for other Renaissance republics. For discussions
of the representations of Lucrece in early modern England, see Nancy
Vickers's The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best': Shakespeare's Lucrece,"
in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and
Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985); Maus, "Taking Tropes
Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece,"
Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82; Jonathan Crewe, "Shakespeare's
Figure of Lucrece: Writing Rape," in Trials of Authorship: Anterior
Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1990), 140-63; Coppelia Kahn, "Lucrece: The
Sexual Politics of Subjectivity," in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn
A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991),
141-59; and Mercedes Maroto Camino, "The Stage am I": Raping Lucrece in
Early Modern England (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Wellen, 1995). Katherine
Eggert's elegant and complex argument about the connection between the
representations of physical rape and theological tropes of the
"rapturous" in "Spenser's Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie
Queene" (Representations 70 [Spring 2000]: 1-26), parallels the sort of
double logic I see at work in Protestant martyrlogy. |
|
29
This is actually a conflation of two verses, Proverbs 31:26 and 31:30,
in reverse order, which emphasizes the connection between speech and
sexuality and the strategic employment of sexuality as the source for
female speech. |
In the sixteenth
century the contained female body became a powerful icon of continence
and purity, deployed with particular effectiveness by Elizabeth, whose
virginal body became representative of the boundaries of the state
itself. See Peter |
|
30 Stallybrass,
"Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewriting the
Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J.
Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-44; Philippa
Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried
Queen (London: Routledge, 1989); and Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The
Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993). |
31 Matchinske, 43. |
32 Askew, 12. While John Rogers, the
first of the Marian martyrs, is often
named as the protomartyr of English Protestantism, Askew's influence on
the patterns of Protestant martyrdom is undeniable. |
33 Knott 16. |
|
34 Foxe does not include these
details in the 1563 edition. These quotes are from the 1583 edition
(1533). |
35
For an example of the erotic significance of shaving, see act 5, scene
3 of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, in Doctor Faustus and Other
Plays. The ritualistic shaving of Edward, along with his death's strong
implications of anal eroticism, "can be seen as an attempt to 'write'
onto him the homoeroticism constantly ascribed to him" (Gregory W.
Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton [Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1991], 76). |
36 See Bray, Homosexuality in
Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), 33-57. |
|
37 As Smith says, "like relations
between men and women, [pedophilia] is not a meeting of equals" (41). |
38"I
Michel de Montaigne, vol. 1 of Essais (1603), ed. Thomas Secombe,
trans. John Florio, (London: Grant Richards, 1908), 232-33, quoted in
Smith, 41. Bruce Smith has noted the legal connection between early
modern conceptions of rape and sodomy, 33-77. |
39 The poem is attributed to "G. G." |
40
While this image elegantly connects Bonner's "deformed nature" to
Protestant critiques of transubstantiation, the overdetermined image of
the cannibal also traditionally encloses the excesses of sodomitical
desire. |
41 While the secondary
definition of "incontinently" as meaning "immediately" is also
applicable in this context, it is reasonable to see the use of this
word as a pun expressing the hypocrisy of Catholic practice which,
according to Protestant propaganda, masked sexual impropriety with
religious zealotry. |
|
42
The identity of the victim in the woodcut is not specified. The
woodcut's caption and the wooded setting could signify either Bonner
beating Hinshaw "in an arbour in his garden" (1689), or it could
represent Miles after he had been taken to Bonner's "orchard" or
"arbor," as the 1583 edition names the location (2044). |
43 Slinger, 50. |
44
See Deborah Burks's analysis of the carnivalesque tropes in Foxes
representation of Bonner in her "Polemical Potency: The Witness of Word
and Woodcut," in John Foxe and His World, ed. Christopher Highley and
King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). |
45
Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern
England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 42. See also Donald
Manger, "John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse," in Queering the
Renaissance, 141-61. |
46 John Bale, quoted in Burks, 15. 47
Askew, 57. |
47 Smith, 43-45. |
|
49 See Bray, Homosexuality in
Renaissance England; Bredbeck, Sodomy and
Interpretation; Goldberg, Sodometries (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1992); and Stewart, Close Readers. |
50 Goldberg, "Sodomy and Society: The
Case of Christopher Marlowe," in
Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean
Drama, ed. David Scott Kasdan and Peter Stallybrass (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 75. |
51 Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance
England, 67-80. |
52
Bray, "Homosexuality"; Masten, Textual Intercourse. See also Forrest
Tyler Stevens's "Erasmus' `Tigress:' The Language of Friendship,
Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter," in Queering the Renaissance,
124-40; and Goldberg, "`Wee/ Men': Gender and Sexuality in the
Formations of Elizabethan High Literariness," in Sodometries, 29-104. |
|
53
The separation of erotic forms was an unstable one, as with the
political scandals surrounding James I's favorites or with the
accusations of sodomy leveled against Bacon. The correspondence between
friendship and sodomy could become, as Bray points out, a powerful
political weapon ("Homosexuality," 53-56). |
54 Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of
Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 12. |
55 Masten, 35, 36. |
56 The queer erotics of martyrdom,
where a naked male body in a state of
ecstasy is violently penetrated, have become self-evident to modern
eyes. A clear connection between the religious iconography of martyrdom
and emergent gay culture, centered on the image of Saint Sebastian, was
to develop by the end of the nineteenth century. See Richard Dellamora,
Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel
Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Richard Kaye "'A
Splendid Readiness for Death': T. S. Eliot, the Homosexual Cult of St.
Sebastian, and World War I," Modernism/Modernity 6 (1999): 107-34. |
57 Rambuss, 39. |
|
58 Bilney was a troubling figure as
he had not only held substantially
orthodox beliefs but he had also recanted twice before his death. See
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 211 ed. (University Park: Penn
State Univ. Press, 1989), 99-104. |
59
The Complete Works of John Lyly, vol. 1, ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1902), 199, quoted in Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of
Male Friendship," 45-46. so Johann Heinrich Meibom, De Flagrorum Usu in
Re Veneria de Lumborum |
60Renumque
Officio (On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of
the Loins and Reins) (trans. 1718), cited in David Savran, Taking it
Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American
Culture (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998), 11-12. Savran's first
chapter usefully historicizes the links that develop between corporal
punishment and eroticism in the early modern period. |
61 Anthony Munday, The English Romayn
Lyfe (London: 1581), 25. 62 Foxe (1583), 1012. |
|
63
But it would seem that Foxe and John Day (his printer) did not find
Bilney's selfpunishment sufficiently scandalous to justify either
changing or disposing of an expensive woodcut, because despite the
alterations in the text the image of Bilney's and Call's bedchamber
remains unchanged through the 1583 edition. |
64
Lisa Jardine, "Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect," in
Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), 78-97.
Jardine cites how Myles Coverdale creates "feelingful epistolary
communication" (89) as he collects |
|
together
Marian martyrs' writings. I contend that this affectivity is not
limited to the rhetoric of letter writing but is part of the intimate
community-production developed amongst martyrs through the dramatic
power of their suffering. |
65 Masten 37. |
|
66 Foxe (1583), 1770. This moment,
once again, parallels the martyrdom of
Polycarp, where a mysterious voice from the sky calls on Polycarp to
"play the man" (Eusebius, 65). And once again, the comparison
emphasizes the reality of Protestant martyrology in contrast to the
mystical nature of earlier martyrologies. |
67
For the importance of this notion of a collective reformist identity to
early nonconformist writers like Foxe and Bale, see Matchinske, 35-40;
and Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 51-80. |
|
68
That is not to say that there is no rational argument in Foxe-the
disputations between martyrs and their captors are models of classical
rhetoric-but martyrology's emphasis on death and horror clearly
privileges pathos over reason as an argumentative strategy. |
69
Ritchie Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of
Nonconformity (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986), 8. |
70
See Greenblatt's "The Word of God," 74-114 for a discussion of the uses
of theatricality in the theological conflicts of the early English
Reformation. |
71 See Huston Diehl,
Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater
in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 185212. |
|
72
Kendall, 8. The affective power of Foxes work has been noted; as Knott
points out, the manner in which Foxe "presents the violence [martyrs]
suffer in detailed and realistic ways" (722) establishes a "humanness
of his characters," and so creates a "suportive community" by allowing
the readers to believe in the "authenticity of the story and empathize
with the victim" (726). In his evocation of empathy, Knott evokes the
seemingly modern elements of Foxes narrative, as individuated identity
energizes an intrapsychic relationship between the textual
representation of the individual martyr and an individual reader, based
in a feeling of sympathy between the martyr and the viewer. "John Foxe
and the Joy of Suffering," Sixteenth Century !ournal 27 (1996): 721-34.
|
|
73
John Northbrooke, quoted in Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle
in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 25. |
74
William Prynne, Hystrio-mastix: The Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedy
(New York: Garland, 1974), 340-41, quoted in Laura Levine, "Rape,
Repetition and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night's Dream,"
in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, M.
Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1996), 222. |
75 Levine, 222. |
|
76
William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxes
Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). Haller's thesis has
come under repeated attack, but the basic tenent still has relevance;
see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of
England (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1992), 249-94. |
77
In "The Translator unto the Christian Reader as Touching the
Translation of these Auncient Histories," in The Auncient
Ecclesiastical) Histories, Hanmer goes into great depth concerning the
sorts of bodily violation these martyrs undergo-he |
|
continues
the list of how "we see the professors of truth" killed; they are
"fried to the bones, shine alive, burned to ashes, hanged on gibbettes,
drowned, brained, scurged, maimed, wartered, their neckes broken, their
legges sawed of, their tongues cutte, their eyes pulled out and the
emptie place seared with scalding iron, the wrapping of them in oxe
hides with dogges and snakes and drowned in the sea, the injoyning of
them to kill one an other, the gelding of Christians, the paring of
their flesh with sharpe rasors, the renting of their sides with the
lashe of the whip, the pricking of their vaines with bodkins, and
famishing of them to death in deepe and noysome dungeons" (iv). |
|