Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe

Trinity Journal, Spring 2004 by Manetsch, Scott M

Brad S. Gregory. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xvi + 528 pp. $20.00.

Rare indeed is the historical monograph that merits the encomium "definitive study" which at the same time makes a substantial methodological contribution. Brad Gregory's cross-confessional history of early modern Christian martyrdom achieves precisely this. Drawing upon hundreds of martyr pamphlets and songs, martyrologies, and theological treatises written by Protestant, Anabaptist, and Catholic believers during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Gregory seeks to reconstruct fundamental religious sensibilities so as to understand the meaning and assess the significance of martyrdom during the Reformation era.

Although early modern Christians often ascribed martyr status to co-religionists who perished in prison or died in collective violence, Gregory's study is primarily concerned with those men and women who were formally judged and executed by public authorities for their religious commitments and subsequently memorialized as "martyrs." Beginning with the deaths of Hendrik Vos and Johann van den Eschen, burned in Brussels for Lutheran sympathies in july 1523, Catholic political authorities executed around 4,400 Protestant and Anabaptist Christians for heresy over the next eighty years. Another 300 Catholic priests, missionaries, and recusants were tried and executed in England for religious beliefs judged as treason between 1535 and 1680. Memorialized in sermons, songs, and print, martyrdom in each of these religious traditions solidified group identity, fostered evangelization, and fueled confessional antagonisms.

Brad Gregory has a methodological axe to grind-and the edge he draws is sharp. In ch. 1 he presents a sustained critique of historians' infatuation with cultural theories and social science models that are predisposed to ignore or minimize the importance of belief, theology, and spirituality for early modern Christians. Gregory notes that conclusions derived from these theories often reveal more about modern interpreters' materialist assumptions or values than about the nature of religious experience in the past. Similarly, post-modern interpreters who depict religious belief or behavior as "mere constructions" invariably misconstrue religious experience and will find the act of martyrdom incomprehensible. Literary and anthropological theories are "the problem," indeed a "dead end" for understanding the character of people's lives and the nature of religious commitment in the sixteenth or any century (pp. 351, 10). Instead, Gregory argues for an interpretive approach that is critical, yet not intrinsically cynical or suspicious, a method that carefully evaluates all available historical evidence without discrediting religious experience a priori. By studying martyrological literature across confessional lines, Gregory wishes to reconstruct the religious sensibilities of sixteenth-century martyrs in a way that the protagonists themselves would have recognized while avoiding the pitfalls of traditional partisan histories. Hence, he gives full expression to these competing religious commitments-after all, people were willing to die for them-yet retains a "formal relativism" between these "competing absolutisms" (p. 12).

With the way cleared for a sympathetic reading of the phenomenon of martyrology, Gregory next explores the historical context and theological landscape that shaped the complex of martyrs. Even if the Middle Ages offered few opportunities for Christians to die for their faith, the pious dream of martyrdom was preserved through popular accounts of martyrsaints (notably Jaques de Voragine's Golden Legend) and sublimated in ascetical practices that cultivated the virtues of devotion to Christ's passion, suffering patiently and dying well. At the same time, the Middle Ages witnessed a growing commitment on the part of Christian magistrates to prosecute heresy to maintain social order and defend true religion. These factors virtually assured a renaissance of Christian martyrdom when the Protestant movement shattered the unity of the church in the early sixteenth century. What made early modern Christians willing to mount the scaffold or perish in the flames? In ch. 4, Gregory levels a blistering attack against psychological theories that reduce martyrdom to neurosis or fanaticism. Rather, martyrdom only makes sense when one takes seriously the martyrs' religiosity. Protestants and Catholics alike recognized the Bible as God's revelation to humanity and received it as the authoritative blueprint for understanding suffering, persecution, and death. Martyrs, together with the communities that sustained them, believed and internalized the biblical message that short-lived agony suffered for Christian truth that promised eternal joy was far superior to physical safety purchased at the cost of one's soul. Choosing faithfulness to God over temporal life, Christian martyrs imitated the company of saints, both ancient and contemporary, who had heeded Christ's call to take up their cross and follow him.