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Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Harvard UP, 1999, xvi + 528 pp., ISBN 0-674-785517, $49.95 £30.95.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (1996) offers the entry "Books of Martyrs," by J.-F. Gilmont, which devotes nearly six columns to the Protestant works of Ludwig Rabus, Jean Crespin, John Foxe, Adrian C. van Haemstede (of Antwerp), and others, but little more than one column to Anabaptist memorials of those martyred for holding to believers' baptism, and a half-column to early modern works on Catholic martyrs on the European continent. But in the same year 1996, Brad Gregory completed his lengthy Princeton dissertation, "Anathema of Compromise," guided by Anthony Grafton and Theodore Rabb, which has become the more compact and updated book here under review.
Professor Gregory, of the History Department of Stanford University, has ably produced a fully cross-confessional study of martyrs, martyrologies, and the solidification that both gave to the distinctive communal identities that emerged from sixteenth-century religious renewals and upheavals. Martyrologies thus take their place among the instruments of "confessionalization."
Gregory's work treats each of the three traditions of Protestant Anabaptist, and Catholic martyrs and martyrologies in chapters of text and back notes extending well over seventy-five pages each. This review will first treat these central, foundational portions, Chapters 5-7, before discussing how Gregory sets his documentary account into a historical and interpretive framework of no little lucidity and persuasive force.
In 1523 pamphlets began circulating, with numerous reprints, to relate the steadfastness of Hendrik Vos and Johann van den Esschen, of the Brussels Augustinian friary, who died at the stake on July 1. Theirs was a dramatic public action of adherence to doctrinal positions framed in sixty-two articles of Lutheran provenance, which they refused to recant. Within weeks Luther himself contributed to the initial spate of publications on his two Flemish confreres with a pamphlet-letter to "the Christians of the Low Countries," exultant that the Gospel has raised up men ready to suffer the utmost for Christ. In short works after later executions, Luther finds confirmation of having recovered the Gospel, understood within a theologia crucis, because Jesus had instructed his disciples specifically on readiness to bear the opposition of persecuting authorities.
From the pamphlets of the...