'To make a second Book of Martyrs': Re-Appropriating Foxe in Nonconformist Prison Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 23; pp. 45 - 61
• Main Author: Daniel, Robert W
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Allusion; Armed forces; Authorship; Biographies; British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Chapbooks; English language; English literature; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Foxe, John (1516-1587); Imprisonment; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary influences; Martyrs; Modern literature; Morality; Palimpsests; Plot (Narrative); Poetry; Prisoners; Prisons; Quakers; Readers; Religion; Religious persecution; Semiotics; Speeches; Writers; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0954-0970

In this essay I wish to demonstrate how Nonconformist prison writers, contrary to the statements just mentioned, did inevitably and irresistibly re-do rather than out-do Foxe. By examining the Foxean cues they re-used and recycled, we can begin to see how their accounts were a complex palimpsest of conceptual, mnemonic and journalistic representations of imprisonment in early modern Britain. I will explore three areas in which authors re-appropriated Foxe: in their prison speeches, prison scriptures, and prison scenes. In doing so, I do not wish to imply that such allusions were more rhetorical than sincerely felt. Many Nonconformists did suffer, and suffered greatly, during their imprisonment. Rather, I wish to explore how the imagistic language of the ‘Book of Martyrs’ provided a legitimate coda for expressing sufferings brought about by religious persecution.