Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe.

Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe 

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. $49.95. xvi + 35 figs. + 528 pp. ISBN: 0-674-78551-7.

The willingness of an individual to embrace death for the sake of the one immutable truth is a concept that can be bewildering in an era when truth is viewed as contestable and, as far as religion is concerned, a warm-hearted ecumenism has relativized and downplayed differences of belief. Historians of early modern Europe, while trained to respect the past on its own terms, have not been immune to this bewilderment, which has resulted in a great deal of misunderstanding about martyrdom in history and the impulse that led people to die (and kill) so that their cause -- their one encompassing truth -- could live. It is the aim and the great achievement of Brad Gregory in Salvation at Stake to address these issues, and in the process to seek out early modern martyrs on their own terms, and in their own words; the result is an enlargement not only of the martyrs themselves, but of our understanding of them despite an age that resists such understanding.

Salvation at Stake examines sixteenth-century Christian martyrdom as it was experienced cross-confessionally among Anabaptists, Protestants, and Roman Catholics, primarily in England, France, and the Low Countries; by deeply and insightfully reading from a huge range of the respective hagiographic, epistolatory, and theological sources, Gregory demonstrates that martyrs "were exceptional in their behavior, but not in their beliefs or values" (8). Indeed, Gregory argues in an early chapter that, contrary to emerging ex nihilo in the sixteenth century, these beliefs carried deep connections with those of previous centuries, when concerns with suffering, dying, Christ's passion, as well as martyrdom "coursed through the veins and strengthened the sinews of late medieval Christianity" (73). As a result of this continuity, notions about the willingness to die as well as the willingness to kill--or persecute--were firmly in place as the sixteenth century began, when reformation developments brought on an unpreceden ted profusion of martyrs.

Every martyr, Gregory writes, followed "scriptural injunctions and promises" (110), which served as the foundation for all faiths, including Roman Catholicism; whether the model was Abel, the Maccabees, Jesus, Stephen, or Paul, individuals embracing death were not "isolated mavericks" but conformers "to an ancient course of action" (119). Martyrs were also members of communities, and the core of Gregory's book is devoted to understanding the way in which those martyrs -- and martyrologies -- singularly helped to forge the larger identity of Protestants, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics. While the chapters on Protestants and Roman Catholics are comprehensive, the truly innovative work here consists of Gregory's examination of Anabaptists, who perpetuated their own distinct "martyrological identity" through songs and the elevation of singing as a form of memorialization. These songs, as well as prison letters, comprise an overlooked collection known as The Sacrifice unto the Lord, in which persecution "confirme d [martyrs'] self-understanding" and helped them view their suffering as a form of discipleship (249).

Any cross-confessional study that takes martyrdom as its underlying theme runs the risk of collapsing difference between faiths and traditions, especially when martyrs, whether Anabaptist or Catholic, went to their deaths in similar ways and according to the same biblical models. Gregory counters this with a fascinating analysis of anti-martyrologies, or polemical works which exposed the false martyrs of the "other side," and condemned followers who, in Miles Huggarde's famous phrase, saw "the holy ghost in the likeness of a dove" when they were actually witnessing the flutterings of fire-roused pigeons around the execution stake (329). In this sense, "the denunciation of false martyrs," Gregory writes, "should be seen in precisely the same light as the celebration of true martyrs," since both true and false are inextricably linked through a process of inclusion and exclusion from a particular creed's canon; moreover, since "the deaths of fellow believers reinforced divergent doctrines," martyrdom was thus a "point where traditions coalesced" at the same time that it caused those traditions to differ profoundly from one another (339-41).

In creating a new perspective in the understanding of early modern martyrdom, Gregory sets out to slay a great deal of methodological dragons, though his weapon tends to be bludgeoning at times as it destroys other approaches which offer up insights into the social and gendered aspects of martyrdom. Nevertheless, Gregory has succeeded in his big, brilliant book to prove himself equally adept at theology and textual analysis as he is at forging new historical directions; above all, he succeeds in shining a light into the souls of his martyrs, as they followed the words of Jesus to "be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life."