According to John Foxe, 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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