While few martyrs made it to sainthood during the early modern period, the idea of martyrdom was nevertheless revitalized and reshaped following the Reformation and New World discoveries. This chapter analyzes how martyrdom functioned across different geographical and religious frontiers – heresy, infidelity, and paganism – whose importance shifted over time in line with Catholic imperial expansion.

By the mid-fifteenth century, the Safavid order had militarized, emerging as a significant threat to regional powers like the Aqquyunlu, Qaraquyunlu, Shirvanshah, and later, the Ottomans. This provoked the deaths of key Safavid leaders – Sheikh Junayd, Haydar, and Sultan ʿAli – along with thousands of their followers, who were killed in battle or executed. Despite these devastating losses, the Safavid community’s loyalty to their cause remained steadfast.

We know precious few facts about the life of Maximus of Turin. He was not a native of Turin, as Maximus himself implies in Sermon 33, and his clerical status upon arrival in the town is unclear. Gennadius of Marseilles’s On Illustrious Men (late fifth century) notes that Maximus was a bishop of Turin and that he died during the period when the reigns of the western emperor Honorius and the eastern emperor Theodosius II overlapped – that is, sometime between 408 and 423. Gennadius also describes Maximus as a competent preacher able to fit his discourse to any occasion or any biblical text. Neither a terribly significant figure from late antiquity nor the most gifted orator of his era, Maximus left behind a collection of more than a hundred sermons that, collectively, offer a glimpse into a rural Christian community in northern Italy during the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Here Maximus testifies to the region’s theological diversity; both heretics generally and “Arian heretics” specifically lurk around his community, as do pagans and lukewarm Christians. Indeed, he frequently complains directly to his congregation that they should attend his sermons with greater frequency.

This chapter traces the development of Iranian Shi’ite revolutionary Ali Shariati in his conception of a nonviolent Islam encompassing humanist, existentialist, and socialist ethics in pursuit of an egalitarian ‘System of Abel’. This is in turn placed in tension with his valorisation of ‘alter-inflicted violence’ as a means to altruistic self-transcendence.

Chapter 6 takes as its subject the relatively sudden proliferation of narrative images of the virtuous deeds and dramatic martyrdom of the saints that became popular themes for altarpieces in the second half of the sixteenth century. These transformations to the altarpiece were the result of earlier artistic developments, but they were also shaped by the context of the Reformations.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

This chapter argues that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preoccupation with agony and martyrdom is best understood in the broader context of Victorian figurations of religious suffering as inherently feminine. The chapter outlines the multiple factors shaping Victorian interest in female martyrs, from new theories of sexology to anxieties over Roman Catholicism. It then examines texts by writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, John Mason Neale, and Charles Kingsley that contain representations of suffering as a Christian virtue to which women are innately disposed. Such texts ostensibly frame women’s martyrdom as a paradoxical means of power through self-disavowal while often containing voyeuristic descriptions of suffering female flesh. Next, the work of Christina Rossetti is introduced as a counterpoint that avoids lurid depictions of sexualized violence in favour of reflections on female subjectivity and salvation. The chapter ends by finding in Hopkins’s martyr texts a complex and nonreductive engagement in this wider discourse.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

Amid the debates about the organization and unity of the church in third-century Carthage, Cyprian rose as a prominent and learned catechist. This chapter looks at several writings associated with basic education – Ad Donatum, Ad Quirinum, De dominica oratione – as well as letters from the ecclesiastical debates to shed light on the way these debates shaped approaches to teaching knowledge of God in catechesis.

This chapter argues that the religious policies of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) are not limited to its frequently noted anti-Puritan satire but are also concerned with Catholic dissent and, more generally, the question of the theatre’s legitimacy and effect on its audiences. The play’s parody of martyrdom arguably reflects the discourse of pseudo-martyrdom to which the Oath of Allegiance controversy had given rise after the Gunpowder Plot and which deeply divided English Catholics, who faced a choice between recusancy, conformity, or some form of semi-conformity. Jonson’s satirical portrayal of Puritans who unsuccessfully attempt to remain ‘religious in midst of the profane’ thus also speaks to Catholic concerns that conformity may eventually lead to an erosion of dissent. This chapter further argues that the Pauline theology of things indifferent is fundamental to the play’s ideological structure and informs both its treatment of religious dissent and the legitimacy of the theatre. Despite its comic resolution, Bartholomew Fair ultimately amounts to a coercive imperative of inclusion that undermines opposition both to the theatre and to the Established Church.

This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

This chapter discusses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an anti-martyr in the two parts of Henry IV. The character of Falstaff isloosely based on the fifteenth-century Lollard martyr John Oldcastle and was indeed once called Oldcastle in performance. Even though Shakespeare transforms the martyr into a cowardly dissembler, who has very little to do with the Lollard martyr, countless allusions to Oldcastle’s martyrdom provide a meaningful interpretative framework for Falstaff’s ‘better part of valour’. However, this does not mean that Shakespeare mocks the Proto-Protestant as part of a Catholic or anti-Puritan campaign. On the contrary, in contrast with the politically subversive martyr figure in 2 Henry IV, Archbishop Scrope, Shakespeare’s transformation of the Lollard martyr rather amounts to a defence of the Elizabethan ideal of outward conformity. Falstaff’s dissimulation, insofar as it can be read as a rejection of martyrdom, is a form of political obedience. Moreover, Falstaff’s dissimulation also entails a defence of theatrical dissimulation that aligns Shakespeare’s theatre closely with the religious policies of the Elizabethan government.

While many accounts of early Christianity see the early Church as a pacifist movement, closely following Jesus’ non-retaliatory teaching, this chapter argues that there is a more ambiguous relationship to violence in the first three centuries of the Christian movement, including military service. Aside from the violent rhetoric in the eschatological parables of Jesus, Christians appropriated the violence of the Hebrew Bible to shape negative views of outsiders, which in turn prepared the way from actualised violence in the post-Constantine era.