Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:22:22.118Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - The Letters of the Martyrs

Remembering and Reclaiming the Apostolic Form

from Part III - Lives and Afterlives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2020

Alexandra Walsham
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Ceri Law
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Brian Cummings
Affiliation:
University of York
Get access

Summary

The English Protestant martyrs’ letters, collected and memorialised in Foxe’s Acts and monuments (1563, with more letters added to each subsequent edition in 1570, 1576 and 1583) and in Coverdale and Bull’s Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true saintes and holy martyrs of God (1564) were a crucial means by which the Tudor Reformation came to be remembered. This chapter argues that these monuments celebrated Protestant apostolic epistolary style in response to the Marian bishop John Christopherson’s direct attack on the presumptuous deployment of the form by the martyr letter writers, helping to shape a polemical context of epistolary memorialisation.This chapter uses the letters of Bishop John Hooper and Lawrence Saunders to examine the role of the literary biblical form of the apostolic letter (letters modelled in the New Testament by the apostles) in memorialising the Protestant Reformation in England and propagating its legacy. It also aims to demonstrate how the deployment of the apostolic model resisted the idea that the martyrology was simply historical commemoration. Radical and nonconformist Protestants across the seventeenth century continually appropriated these apostolic letters, asserting a distinctly Reformed epistolary tradition and inheritance and a distinctly Reformed interpretation of ongoing apostolic succession.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×