Finding the balance between historicist practice and theoretical insight is vital to my project. When used in conjunction, historicism and theory are complementary.30 So, while most historical studies of eighteenth-century eroticism and pleasurable suffering rightly emphasize their incommensurability with later psychoanalytic concepts such as masochism, there are threads of connection between them; following those threads across the centuries allow us to ask new questions of early American writing and performance. How, we might ask, have eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts and writers helped create material, intellectual, and emotional conditions of possibility for sexological and psychoanalytic taxonomies? How were social, psychological, and public processes transformed in the process?
These broad investigatory questions were inspired by the specific historical problem raised by Reik’s focus on publicity in his distinction between roses and neuroses. What exactly did happen when miracles of transformation—the winter bloom of the rose, the flight of a dove from a martyr’s mouth—faded from Christian accounts of redemptive suffering? Many such instances of disappearance may be traced to sixteenth-century debates about the Eucharist, in which Protestant reformers disavowed God’s direct contravention of natural law. Mainstream English Protestant exegesis maintained that miraculous transformation was only a symbol or representation of the true miracle, God’s salvation of the soul from sin. In the English literary tradition, the most significant disappearance of miracles of transformation from scenes of suffering occurred in John Foxe’s four editions of the Book of Martyrs (1563–83). Foxe’s portraits of Protestant martyrs draw on a pagan tradition of noble death and a medieval Judeo-Christian tradition of joyful suffering.31 No roses bloom when Foxe’s martyrs are tortured, but neither do they become neurotic. In an early modern Protestant ideological framework, physical transformations cannot signify martyrdom’s miraculous power. Instead, martyrs are men and women whose faith allows them to experience feminizing, abjecting torture and yet produce bold, masculinized speech (or, less often, eloquent silence in the face of demands to speak).32 In the lavish illustrations from the Book of Martyrs, virtually every martyr has their palms pressed together or hands upraised and mouth open, as if in prayer. Many of the larger cuts illustrating specific accounts of martyrdom featured speech banners with pious messages emanating from the martyrs’ mouths. The spectacular violations, tortures, and burnings for which the Book of Martyrs is justly famous worked hand in glove with more quotidian scenes of speech in suffering. In the episode that ended Foxe’s 1563 edition, the “godly Matrone” Gertrude Crokehay, jailed in Amsterdam for allegedly being an Anabaptist, “declar[ed] … her faith boldly, without any feare” and found herself quickly freed. Foxe thereby connects these everyday declarations of faith to more spectacular public acts of dissenting speech.33 Whether at home, in court, or on the scaffold, dissenting speech reverses the disabling political and emotional intent of jailing, public burning, and other spectacular punishment. Dissenting speech moves an audience of observers, readers, and other witnesses to the Protestant cause.34
Print accounts of torture, operating through serial acts of compilation, publication, circulation, discussion, revision, and republication, played an important role in Protestant self-definition by multiplying the power of witnessing. The Book of Martyrs itself thematized this value of print, describing oral and textual engagements with martyrdom as central to dissenting religious subjectivity.35 Foxe’s famous 1576 account of Bishop Nicholas Ridley’s botched burning helps illustrate the larger pattern. As Foxe writes, Queen Mary’s executioners tied Ridley and his fellow “Oxford Martyr” Hugh Latimer to the stake and lit the kindling beneath their feet. Latimer, attempting to encourage Ridley, told him to “plaie the manne”; dying “manfully,” Latimer prophesied, would transform their burning into a vehicle for Reformation by lighting “suche a candle [as] shall neuer be put out.”36 Latimer burnt up quickly and died but Ridley, in ironic fulfillment of Latimer’s prophecy, was tortured by a fire of “euill makyng.” Gruesomely, Ridley “burned cleane all his neather partes, before [the fire] once touched the vpper,” with Ridley praying piously all the while. Ridley’s mutilated but speaking body came to embody martyrological abjection, becoming, as one critic has it, a site “of pity recuperated as … defiant strength.”37 Indeed, Foxe insisted that emotional response could transform such suffering into a spiritually and socially redemptive experience. “[S]urely,” Foxe wrote, “it moued hundredes to teares, in beholdyng the horrible sighte. For I thynke there was none that had not cleane exiled all humanitie and mercie, whiche would not haue lamented to beholde the furie of the fire so to rage vpon their bodies.” Here as elsewhere, Foxean martyrology constructs Protestant subjectivity around the sympathetic public response (“teares, in beholdyng”) to the martyr’s manly will to suffer (“plaie the manne”) a sensational, feminizing physical violation (“burned cleane all his neather partes”) caused by an intemperate Catholic desire (“the euill makyng of the fire”).38 In elaborating and sometimes eroticizing a discourse of embodied agony as the basis for Protestant martyrological public subjectivity, Foxe hoped to vindicate Protestantism by presenting Marian martyrs as the true heirs to the Christian legacy of redemptive suffering.39 Public accounts of suffering, rendered in highly gendered, often sexual, and subtly imperial terms, take on the once-miraculous capacity to signify faith.
During both the execution and the public circulation of execution narratives, representation and mediation play a crucial role. Foxe and his book inherit the martyr’s primary duty to help transform violence into a vehicle for sustaining communities of dissent.40 Indeed, the Book of Martyrs became so important to nonconformists that Bishop Laud refused to license a new edition in the early seventeenth century.41 Ridley’s burning, in particular, became something of a touchstone for all sorts of dissent; it was excerpted and reprinted with surprising frequency in theological and popular magazines until the mid-nineteenth century, though its meaning shifted dramatically.42 In short, despite the royal imprimatur on Foxe’s work and its orthodox support for church and king, the logic of Foxean martyrdom, in which suffering forms the basis for dissenting speech and publication, ensured that martyrology became central to new modes of dissent in England and its Atlantic colonies.
Atlantic martyrology was informed by many different colonial practices and dreams of empire.43 These, in turn, would be crucial to martyrology’s contributions to the later development of race. As Protestant martyrological traditions crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, they were reflected and refracted through the practice and fantasy of colonial enterprise. Sensational representations of suffering in English, French, and Dutch translations of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación (1552) were of special importance.44 One of Foxe’s collaborators translated the first English edition of Las Casas, and the depictions of suffering in the Book of Martyrs share a common representational language with English and other Protestant translations of Las Casas’s work.45 The dialogue between martyrology and English colonial strategy hinges on the translations’ different