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Article Excerpt
One of the pervasive thematic interests throughout Foxe's narratives of captivity and torture is how human heroism can be memorialized adequately for succeeding generations who profess the reformist faith. In some prefatory remarks to the Pandectae locorum communium Foxe enquired: 'what can poets, what can historians, what can rhetoricians, and orators [...] provide by their art without memory [...]?'. This chapter explores a number of accounts of martyrdom across the chronological span of The Actes and Monuments. It combines detailed analysis with a more general appreciation of early modern ideas on the implications of remembering. Particular attention is devoted to the narrative strategies Foxe deploys in his accounts of captivity, torture, and execution down the ages and how these might be seen to engage with prevailing sixteenth-century cultural discourses regarding the status and function of memory and the writing of history.
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Every past is worth condemning ...
(Friedrich Nietzsche) (1)
Anxieties surrounding the relationships between acts of memory and constructions of cultural power have pressed down upon the minds of writers and thinkers in more modern times as much as they did upon those seeking to frame cultural narratives in the sixteenth century for wider consumption. Some of the most urgent enquiries have focused on the very unruliness of memory--the unwillingness of the faculty to submit instinctively to discipline and to adhere to principles of discrimination: as a consequence, it has often been viewed from the writings of antiquity onwards as a worthy subject for training and mental labour. In more recent years, rather than becoming a valuable postmodern resource with which to ironize and elide the past, in the increasingly sombre world vision of those wishing to narrativize the developments of lives and selves for the twenty-first century, memory has been regarded as a key factor in the cultural power play of institutions and as a source of epistemological insecurity. The cultural theorist Jacques Le Goff, for example, has argued that,
Memory is the raw material of history [...] Because its workings are usually unconscious, it is in reality more dangerously subject to manipulation by time and by societies given to reflection than the discipline of history itself [...] The document is not objective, innocent raw material, but expresses past society's power over memory and over the future: the document is what remains. (2)
The intellectual discomfort in evidence in such enquiries (which nonetheless acknowledge the pre-eminent status of the faculty) clearly has counterparts in many of the documents dealing with the very nature of memory that survive from the Tudor period; here, memory is not only frequently linked with formulation of spiritual and political identity, but with the need for a strict mental regime in order to realize its fullest potential. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Juan Luis Vives stressed that
we be framed and facioned by these three things, knowledge, wit, & Memory, & the diligence whiche we use to the atteyning of them, is called study. Wit is quickened by exercise and memory encreased by diligent tillinge and occupienge thereof: delicate handelynge weakeneth them both [...] Whether thou rede or here ani thing, do it with attention and effectuously, let not thy mind wander, but constraine it to be there, and to do that thyng, whych is in hande, and none other. (3)
One of his contemporaries, Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Boke of the Gouernour (1531), chose to follow in Cicero's footsteps, attributing to the faculty an ethical power to shape the future direction of humanity: 'Experience whereof commeth wysedome [...] The knowledge of this Experience is called Example, and is expressed by historie, whiche of Tulli is called the life of memorie.' (4) Later in the century, amongst Foxe's own contemporaries, the translator William Fulwood declared in the dedicatory address to Robert Dudley prefacing the fruit of his labours, namely the rendering into English of a work by Guglielmo Gratarolo (The Castel of Memorie), that 'Memorie (as Seneca witnesseth) is the principall commoditie and profit that mans nature can receyueth'. (5) However, perhaps most notably for scholars of Elizabethan literature, George Puttenham argued forcefully in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) that
There is nothing in man of all the potential parts of his mind (reason and will except) more noble or more necessary to the active life then memory: because it maketh most to a sound iudgement and perfect worldly wisedome, examining and comparing the times past with the present, and by them both considering the time to come, concludeth with a stedfast resolution, what is the best course to be taken in all his actions and aduices in this world: it came vpon this reson, experience to be so highly commended in all consultations of importance, and preferred before any learning or science, and yet experience is no more than a masse of memories assembled, that is, such trials as man hath made in time before. (6)
In prosecuting his point, Puttenham clearly demonstrated the reverence in which the faculty was held in his own time; and on further analysis it becomes increasingly evident that early modern Europe had become the inheritor of a whole series of often competing discourses surrounding the ways in which memory might be interpreted.
The central positioning of the faculty of memory in pedagogic theories of the sixteenth century (and indeed later) is widely apparent in the documents of the period, and the cultural undertaking of commemoration preoccupied John Foxe in particular in diverse ways throughout his publishing career. In some prefatory remarks to the Pandectae locorum communium (1572), for example, he had enquired, 'what can poets, what can historians, what can rhetoricians, and orators [...] provide by their art without memory'. (7) In his magnum opus described in the 1583 (London) edition as the Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church with an vniuersall history of the same, wherein is set forth at large the whole race and course of the Church, from the primitiue age to these latter tymes of ours, with the bloudy times, horrible troubles, and great persecutions agaynst the true martyrs of Christ, sought and wrought as well by heathen emperours, as nowe lately practised by Romish prelates, especially in this realme of England and Scotland, (8) memory lay once again at the very heart of authorial motivations, and as the project grew in magnitude, every effort was made to ensure that no precious detail of Catholic persecution down the ages would be allowed to slip the attention of his pen.
The preliminary versions of this work were published in Latin on the continent in 1554 and 1558 during the reign of Mary I, and then expanded to twice the original length into English in 1563, when her stepsister Elizabeth was on the throne. The next edition of The Actes and Monuments was reworked for 1570 and expanded significantly once again: from 1471 folio pages in 1563 to 2314 in 1570. (The later editions in Foxe's lifetime in 1576 and 1583 also underwent further revisions.) In the editions of 1563 and 1583 Foxe appended to the main body of text a 'Kalender of Martyrs' in which Tudor Protestants who had been burnt at the stake jostled for position with New Testament figures to be commemorated on an annual basis. This additional document, together with a series of woodcut images dispersed throughout the volume (expanded in number from fifty-three in 1563 to over 150 in the 1570 edition), established the publication as the pre-eminent vehicle in English for celebrating the martyrs of the Reformed faith. (9) Both the 'Kalender' and the woodcut images were supplementary memorial devices that were deployed in The Actes and Monuments to signal crucial narratives of persecution. Given the enormous and complex operations at the presses to bring the work into the public domain, it is little wonder that John N. King terms this 'the largest and most complicated English printing venture of its age'. (10) Indeed, Foxe's work continued to be published into the seventeenth century, and it has been estimated that by the ninth edition in 1684 there were some ten thousand copies in circulation. (11) Clearly, the early career of the volume could only have been enhanced when a meeting of Convocation in 1571 decided that 'euery Archbishop and bishop shall haue in hys house The holy Bible in the largest volume, as it was lately printed at London, and also that full and perfect history, which is intituled Monumentes of Martyres', in addition to copies being 'bestowed in [...] Cathedrall Church[es], in such conuenient place, that the vicars [...] and other ministers of the Church, as also straungers and forieners may easelie come vnto them, and read thereon'. (12) By 1577 William Harrison famously observed that
euerye offyce at court hath eyther a Byble, or the bookes of the acts and Monumentes of the Church of Englande or both, beside some hystoryes and Chronicles lying therin, for the exercise of such as come...
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