SOURCE: Macek, Ellen. “The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in The Book of Martyrs. Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 1 (spring 1988): 63-80.

[In the following essay, originally presented in 1984, Macek examines the role of female participants in the English Reformation.]

God forbyd that I shoulde loose the lyfe eternall for this carnal and short lyfe. I wyl never turne from my heavenly husband, to my earthly husband: from the felowship of angels, to mortal chyldren: And if my husband and chyldren be faithfull, then am I theirs. God is my father, God is my mother, God is my sister, my brother, my kinsman, God is my frend most faithfull.¹

So reads the testimony of a simple housewife during the reign of Mary Tudor. Her story appears in one of the two most popular books of the late Tudor period—John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. This work, commonly known as The Book of Martyrs, contains Foxe's account of the lives and deaths of many martyrs in all ages, but especially during the Marian persecutions. It provides the reader with more information about female participants in the English Reformation than any other work.²

Roland Bainton and Carole Levin have used the stories of Foxe's women martyrs as examples of feminine intelligence and assertiveness as well as proof of the continued adherence to social norms for female behavior.³ Some historians, however, have suggested that scholars “read between the lines” of accounts of women's roles in periods of great religious intensity. Retha Warnicke in her study of Englishwomen in the Renaissance and Reformation and Elizabeth Petroff in her seminal work on the evidence for female empowerment in medieval hagiography have indicated that asking new questions of traditional sources will often yield an abundance of information on the stages of women's generally unexplored process of spiritual maturation.⁴

By treating Foxe's stories within the perspective of current scholarship on women's history and spirituality, this study will examine how Foxe's female confessors of the faith undergo a dual process of spiritual growth and moral liberation from the restraints of Tudor society and the Roman church. The events of the early Reformation period, as experienced by female Protestants, involve not only a basic reorientation in religious belief and practice but also a radical personal transformation that has generally escaped the scrutiny of past historians because of an apparent lack of evidence. Upon careful analysis, however, one discerns an incipient women's subculture in which Tudor women of reformed persuasions moved from group heteronomy to autonomy and finally self-transcendency.⁵ The quest for autonomy, whether acknowledged by the protagonists or not, begins with that process described by historian Gerda Lerner as

moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, bound to a past without meaning, and prepared for a future determined by others. It means moving into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future.⁶

Foxe's women, however, appear to move beyond mere autonomy to a stage more properly belonging to spiritual or religious development and maturation. They cooperate in a transformation not entirely of their own making and easily confused from a feminist perspective with backsliding. The full results of this spiritual transformation belong to theological analysis, but the outward signs are of interest to the historian of religion as well. That this pattern of multiple transitions is not immediately obvious is clearly the result of Foxe's own strong religious and cultural prejudices, his masculine outlook, and later historians' negative assessments of him as a responsible scholar.

Helen White has amply outlined Foxe's concept of a universal Christian history and the role that the early English Protestants and their forerunners played in the national unfolding of the divine plan. But if Foxe's work fit well into the broader context of martyr stories and earlier hagiography as White contends, by this very emphasis Foxe also continued the perspectives of those genres that slighted or ignored the complex spiritual and psychological processes involved in becoming an heroic Christian, a saint or a martyr.⁷ Furthermore, Foxe's own ambivalence toward women in his accounts, his patriarchal expectations for female roles, and his early promotion of a new Protestant ethic of marriage have served to conceal the clues to a process of feminine self-actualization and spiritual maturation.⁸ In fact, there is a major contradiction in Foxe's book as the spiritually and morally liberating nuances of the women's experiences remain unacknowledged except for the very superficial recognition of “womanyshe and wyvishe hartes” gaining “a bolde and manlye stomacke” through divine aid.⁹

It is not only because of Foxe's overtly polemical purposes and patriarchal orientation, however, that his women's stories have remained relatively unexplored. Foxe's credibility as an historical source has been under scrutiny as long as his book has been in print. Within the past fifty years, largely as a result of the efforts of J. F. Mozley, Foxe has enjoyed favorable recognition for both the soundness of his sources and the general accuracy of their transmission.¹⁰

The work of White and Mozley has now clarified Foxe's polemical overtones and established his scholarly standards. Drawing from their contributions, the contemporary historian is able to overlook occasional errors of fact, discrepancies, mistranslations, abridgements and paraphrases, editorial choices of evidence, and even a few fabricated speeches.¹¹ As we learn more about Foxe's methodology, we admire the part he played, unwittingly to be sure, in the transmission of a number of details surrounding the lives of women, details which originally may have been of an oral nature, only later committed to writing, often at Foxe's instigation.¹² Foxe has little reason to create a false position for his female protagonists. It is the very lowliness of the women's social status, in many cases, and the cultural disadvantages of their class and gender that Foxe exposes, because it fits so well with his paradigm of divine intervention in human affairs. If anything, Foxe may underestimate the individual strength of character behind any one of his female subjects in the effort to prove that God uses the weakest of human agents in extraordinary ways.

In Foxe's accounts we confront lay women as individuals, rather than the stereotyped ladies of the fabliaux and dramatic or lyric literature—all genres popular in early sixteenth-century England.¹³ The women provide a glimpse into the rich tapestry of Tudor society and reveal characters as varied and memorable as Elizabethan drama itself. Some women are timid, submissive, modest, and humble; others are brash, forceful, and outspoken. Very rarely are we given a life history, like that accorded to male Protestant martyrs, but the reality of these women and their responses remains convincing. Although the noble or gentlewoman such as Lady Jane Gray or Joyce Lewys appears on occasion, Foxe's brief descriptions of women of the middling or even servant class paint portraits of the bustling Tudor town life and the significant role of women in the household of the craftsman or merchant. In Foxe's pages, we meet Elizabeth Folkes, servant to a clothier, Cicelie Ormes, wife of a worsted weaver, and Isabel Foster, a cutler's wife.¹⁴ Although some women such as Anne Potten are married, there are also maids like Rose Bettingham, and widows such as Katherine Hutte. In Foxe's accounts women of diverse ages appear—Mother Seaman is sixty-six, Alice Potkins, forty-nine, and Elizabeth Folkes, twenty.¹⁵

Women are involved in a variety of activities and situations. Foxe describes them in such circumstances as visiting friends or relatives in prison, putting up surety for a suspected heretic, hiding from the authorities in “Rowes, Bushes, Groves, and fields, or sometyme in her neighbors house,” concealed in a stuffy cupboard, flinging a brick at an official, and fleeing overseas only to return to England as an importer of illegal books.¹⁶ Women's relationships reveal obvious patterns of evangelization. In the Warne and Mount families, mothers and adult daughters share a commitment to the reformed faith.¹⁷ As diverse as these women are in terms of age and experiences, they enjoy a relative freedom of movement that provides them greater exposure to the new religious ideas than women of either the upper or lowest class whose mobility is more restricted or opportunity more limited because of socio-economic conditions. There is no expression of surprise, in fact, when a woman from Cornwall leaves her husband and children to work in various places as a spinner. Nor does it appear extraordinary that a self-supporting blind woman might purchase a New Testament and have people read to her.¹⁸ As Natalie Zemon Davis has suggested in the case of sixteenth-century French urban women and Patrick Collinson of Puritan women, so these Englishwomen also acted as free agents enjoying a considerable amount of independence that encouraged and reinforced their participation in the heterodox religious movements of the age.¹⁹

The personal religious experiences of these women prior to their conversions lack documentation in Foxe. For many of them, an identification with the Church of Rome consisted of a minimum performance of religious duties according to church law. They supplemented public worship with private devotions including prayers to the saints particularly in times of great distress such as childbirth. Middle or lower-class women might belong to one of the many religious confraternities that were popular among the laity during this period.²⁰ In comparison with the clergy, religious women, and even laymen, however, the laywoman's path of spiritual liberation and maturation lacked significant models of spirituality within orthodox Christianity.

What then does John Foxe tell us about the process of spiritual “awakening” of these women as they move from their daily and sometimes petty concerns with family and material goods to a position of esteemed sanctity? Although Foxe's evidence is fragmentary because he rarely traces the story of any one woman from her initial growth in religious or moral consciousness to her martyrdom, there is enough information on a number of women to describe a common pattern.

Inevitably the conversion experience assumes importance in Foxe's accounts. In their stories the women sometimes mentioned their initial exposure to reformed beliefs that would result in a conversion. For some, the legalization of such beliefs in the reign of Edward VI had provided the initial impetus.²¹ Isabel Foster admitted to her conversion during that reign when she heard “the Gospel truly preached and opened to the people.”²² Joan Waste was a blind woman who during Edward's reign “by hearyng Homilies and Sermons, … became mervelous well affected to the religion then taught.”²³ Jone Hornes had embraced reformed doctrine during Edward's reign when she was eleven years of age.²⁴ When the poor woman from Cornwall, Mrs. Prest, was asked where she had learned her beliefs, she observed that “I have upon the sondayes visited the sermons, and there have I learned such things. …”²⁵

The witnessing or recounting of an actual martyrdom often served as an occasion of “awakening” for these women. The stories and actions of the Protestant martyrs replaced or paralleled those in the familiar sources such as The Golden Legend and reinforced the comparison that Foxe drew between the present conditions in England and those endured by the early Christians who had suffered persecution for their faith.²⁶

Foxe numbered the witnesses to the burning of seven from Colchester in the thousands. Included in that group of martyrs were five women. One woman, Elizabeth Folkes, dramatically threw away her petticoat as she uttered the words: “fare wel al the world … farewel fayth, fare wel hope, and so taking the stake in her arms said: welcome love etc.”²⁷ Joyce Lewys sought instruction in reformed belief and changed her style of living after witnessing Lawrence Saunder's martyrdom. Her own burning at the stake drew “a great multitude of people,” observed Foxe, and implicated others, particularly women, in heretical beliefs.²⁸ About two hundred people stood around between seven and eight in the morning to see Cicelie Ormes meet her death. At the stake, she wiped some of its soot on her in remembrance of her predecessors who died for the faith, Elizabeth Cooper and Simon Miller, and she began to recite the Magnificat as the fire blazed around her.²⁹ Although some women may have attended such an event to give support to a martyr of the faith, others went in curiosity and left inspired by the force of the witness of these early Protestants.

But new beliefs needed nurturing before spectators would be ready to undergo such a self-transcending act themselves. The process of transformation after initial conversion by exposure to preaching or martyrdoms included an informal regime of study, prayer, and community support. All provided the women with a sense of Christian self-identity and empowerment.

Under early Protestantism women gained admittance to a life of prayer and learning on a more equal basis with men. Such an invitation to religious and intellectual equality must have been particularly attractive to women of intelligence and quick wit whose status allowed them some leisure time to pursue these activities. In the reformers' letters to members of their congregations or to friends and family, they imposed the necessity for self-knowledge, prayer, and meditation upon men and women alike. To his wife Robert Smith warned, “Be friendly to all creatures, and especiallye to your owne soule.”³⁰ When Lawrence Saunders wrote to his wife, he urged her to remain firm in the faith “by exercising your inward man in meditation of Gods most holy worde, beyng the sustenaunce of the soule, and also by gevyng your selfe to humble prayer. …”³¹ Robert Smith advised his wife to use “understanding, prayer, and fasting” to counteract worldly influences, while John Philpot exhorted a group of women to “be occupied in prayer and continuall meditation, with reverent talkyng of the word of God wythout contention amongest the saintes.”³²

Habits of prayer and meditation needed support in the Christian community of which women were an essential part. The imprisoned Thamas Haukes urged his wife not only to pray continuously but also “to keepe company with those, of whom ye maye learne to come to a more perfect knowledge in God. …”³³

Foxe's accounts provide substantial evidence that women found community encouragement and bonding in secret conventicles. Elizabeth Warne's apprehension occurred on the first day of January as she was meeting with others gathered in a house in Bowe churchyard for prayer.³⁴ Alice Mount, her husband, and daughter were among a group in Much Bentley, Essex, who refused to go to the popish service but rather met with others who “gave them selves diligently to reding, invocating, and callynge upon the name of God. …³⁵ The faith community not only fostered female piety but also nurtured the self-assertiveness of the individual. In Stoke, Suffolk, a large group attempted to withstand the pressure of royal authorities to conform. Finding it difficult to resist the exhortations of a conforming husband, one woman resorted secretly to the nonconforming group where “the other women bad her not withstanding to be a good chere, and sayde that they woulde make their earnest prayers unto the Lord, both for her and her husband. …” Their prayers appear to have had their desired effect with the husband's return to the reformed fold.³⁶ Group moral support sometimes resulted in community action. A group of women remonstrated with Adam Foster who, although superficially sympathetic to reform, had permitted his son to work for the parish priest.³⁷

Women who entered into the reformed community assumed the obligation of expanding their basic Christian knowledge and their familiarity with Scripture and specific Protestant doctrine.³⁸ Although some scholars have ably demonstrated this facet of early Protestant women's spiritual maturation, they have not emphasized enough the benefits of self-assurance and the strengthening of Christian self-identity that accompanied such knowledge, as Petroff has done for the female medieval mystics.³⁹ Foxe himself recognized the effects of such feminine learning on spectators; only occasionally did he provide clues to the transformation it produced in the women's lives. He tells his readers, for instance, of Agnes Silverside, a sixty-year-old widow who stood her ground with five others (including two women) accused of heresy and responded “with such sound judgement and boldnesse, to every thyng they asked her, that it rejoyced the heartes of many, and specially her patience, against the tauntes and checks of her enemies, for her reverent olde age.”⁴⁰ On another occasion Foxe remarks that both Margery Austoo and her husband provided ready answers to points of doctrine but “especially the woman, to whom the Lord had geven the greater knowledge and more ferventnes of spiryt.”⁴¹ A gentlewoman returning from a visit to the poor woman imprisoned in Exeter remarked to her husband “that in her life shee never heard of a woman (of such simplicitie to see to) talke so godly, so perfectly, so sincerely, and so earnestly: in so much that if God were not with her, shee could not speake such things: to the which I am not able to answeare her (said shee) [I] who can reade, and shee can not.”⁴²

But we learn more about Elizabeth Driver's growth in self-esteem in her own statement that in spite of being a poor man's daughter who had worked the fields and never had a university education, by God's grace she would hold her own position against the papist views.⁴³ And when confronted with her lack of theological background, Elizabeth Young claimed that, although she was not trying to teach the bishop's Chancellor, “I let you knowe what I knowe: and by argument one shal knowe more.”⁴⁴

A significant indication of the connection between growth in knowledge and its accompanying empowerment came from the testimony that Anne Askew gave in response to a comment made during one of her interrogations concerning the knowledge and practical application of scriptural study. Askew responded: “My Lord I would wish that all men knew my conversation and livinge in all poynts, for I am so sure of my selfe this houre that there are none able to prove any dishonestie by me.”⁴⁵ In her self-assurance, Anne expressed for the inarticulate, silent numbers of early Protestant women the confidence born of their equal access to the Word that was nurtured in a prayerful and meditative environment supported by a Christian community in which they were significant members rather than outsiders.

In tandem with such spiritual maturation was a restructuring of individual commitments with service to the Lord taking priority over duties to spouse, children, and community. By assuming responsibility for their nonconformist activity, these women overcame the stultifying effect of immersion in daily activity that undoubtedly presented obstacles to their spiritual development.⁴⁶ Foxe himself provided the paradigm for such unusual female behavior by recounting the story of the early Christian martyr Dionysia who, although the mother of many children, “loved [them] not above the Lorde.”⁴⁷ Anticipation of possible effects of their reformed position forced women to reassess their priorities. One of Foxe's accounts described two married women and a maid deep in discussion concerning avenues open to them as members of a heretical group. The maid would choose flight, if necessary, while one wife admitted that she was

tied to a husband, and have besides a sorte of yonge children at home. And then, I know not how my husbande being a carnall man wil take my departure from hym. Therfore I am minded for the love of Christ and his trueth to stande to the extremitye of the matter.⁴⁸

The critical choice might in reality never occur for each woman, but it is obvious that they had prepared themselves psychologically for that choice. In this case both matrons were imprisoned together.

Some women continued for a while to satisfy the roles demanded of them both by the order of creation and of salvation. One woman was forced to flee her home within a few days of childbirth.⁴⁹ For Michael's wife, already imprisoned for her beliefs, there was a maintenance of past connections as long as possible. This entailed daily release from prison at Ipswich to visit her family so that she might “shewe her duty therin whyle she might have libertie.”⁵⁰ Others went into hiding to prevent detection and maintain minimum family contact. Agnes Wardall broke her seclusion to visit her children and during the night was disturbed by authorities knocking on her door. She hid in a cupboard and almost suffocated before escaping to a ditch covered with nettles.⁵¹ Alice had a faithful servant to care for her children; Elizabeth Young's children became a burden for neighbors. In fact, two women gave surety for the imprisoned Young, accused of importing illegal books, so that her children would not be left on their hands.⁵²

When imprisonment did result in separation from one's family, woman's physical nature sometimes presented her with the unenviable position of caring for an infant even while awaiting death or prolonged imprisonment. Such women apparently felt the confidence expressed by John Careless in a letter to his wife in which he reassured her that in spite of their position as recognized heretics “the Lord hym self wyl be a Father and Mother …” to their children. “He hym selfe wyll doo all thynges necessarye for them: yea as muche as rocke the Cradle, if neede be.”⁵³ Some women continued their natural nurturing activities to the bitter end. Agnes Bongeor had sent away a child that she had been nursing in preparation for her immediate martyrdom. She suffered great spiritual turmoil when a bureaucratic delay prevented her from joining her colleagues at the stake.⁵⁴ One imagines that she must have suffered some physical distress as well at the sudden cessation of nursing. Then there was Joan Dangerfield, mother of ten children, who was imprisoned with her fourteen-day-old child and husband. She and her child eventually died as the result of the wretched prison conditions where she was forced to warm the infant's clothes with her own body heat. The husband had recanted (much to Joan's dismay), was set free, and ultimately died by his own hand. Foxe indicates the remainder of the family suffered no better fate.⁵⁵ Foxe chooses his stories well for their emotional appeal. They exhibit, moreover, individual women making hard choices on the basis of a religious commitment freely embraced in the course of their spiritual maturation.

Other women who made the choice to serve their faith above all often experienced violent rejection by loved ones and dislocation. Foxe records Hooper's wise admonition to Anne Warcof that in her spiritual journey “you shall meete husband, children, lovers and frends, that shall if God be not with them … be very lettes and impedimentes to your purpose.”⁵⁶ Joyce Lewys, after instruction in reformed beliefs, found herself forced to church “by the furiousnes of her husband.” Reported to authorities for her heretical practice, she underwent interrogation and was released with the stipulation that she report to the bishop in a month. Her relapse into Protestantism prompted her husband to turn her in to the bishop.⁵⁷ Alice Benden's husband tried in vain to make her conform and, when she refused, his idle talk to parishioners alerted the authorities.⁵⁸ Elizabeth Lawson, sixty years of age, spent almost three years in prison before her release early in Elizabeth's reign. Her husband had sold all her clothes while she was imprisoned and refused to help her after her release, even though the house and land he held was originally hers. She depended upon charity for the rest of her life.⁵⁹ Mrs. Prest, who confronted opposition within her family to her conversion and was later rebuked for leaving them, observed that “my houswifry is but smal: but God geve me grace to go to the true church.” She was declared crazy by the authorities.⁶⁰ Physical separation from family, whether freely chosen or enforced, caused disorder in Tudor society even while it enhanced the nascent moral autonomy of the women involved.⁶¹

Modern scholars of the female religious experience tell us that most women undergo some period of crisis in their spiritual development, especially if they are to reach beyond the stage of moral autonomy to the highest state of spiritual maturation, that of self-transcendence.⁶² Forced or voluntary separation from home and family was one such crisis. Other women temporarily submitted to pressures and renounced their earlier commitment to reformed beliefs. Their manner of resolving such a crisis indicates their high sense of self-identity, their developing autonomy, their commitment to the early reforming communities, and their psychological readiness to embark on a higher level of spiritual maturation. Elizabeth Cooper of Norwich, for instance, recanted her reformed beliefs. But one day “being unquiet for the same, and greatlye troubled inwardlye, at the last came in to the saide sainte Andrewes churche, the people being at their popish service, and there standing in the same …” revoked her prior recantation, “willinge the people not to be deceived, neither to take her doinges before for anye example, etc.”⁶³ Elizabeth Folkes on two occasions was bound over to the custody of a Catholic on the insistence of well-placed friends who hoped for her eventual recantation. When rumor spread that she had joined the papist side, she realized the implications of her compromising position and refused any opportunity for escape.⁶⁴ Cicelie Ormes, taken at the burnings of two martyrs, had recanted a year before, “but never after was she quiet in conscience, until she was utterly driven from all their Poperie.” Ormes had a letter written to the Chancellor informing him of her changed position.⁶⁵ Bosom's wife, when forced into church, made a spectacle of herself by performing the exact opposite of the congregation's actions. She exhibited her obstinancy by standing while they kneeled and turned to the back of the church when they faced the front.⁶⁶

Whether or not one had experienced a crisis of faith, it is clear that preparation for the final step of religious transformation occurred in the solitude of prison life. Time was spent in prayer, meditation, uplifting conversation, and exhortation of fellow prisoners. Deprivation, voluntary or forced, deepened the basic ascetical pattern of this solitary life. Once-busy laywomen, released from ordinary secular and family obligations, lived out the harsh reality of their choices and realized their inner freedom and self-possession.⁶⁷ Only brief glimpses of the final preparatory stage appear in Foxe's pages. Agnes Bongeor received comfort through reading and prayer, although she had sent her nursing babe from her and her death was delayed because of a bureaucratic problem.⁶⁸ Alice Benden and Mrs. Potkin practiced deprivations in food in order to prepare themselves for even worse prison conditions.⁶⁹ When Alice was later isolated for nine weeks and forced to live in filthy conditions, she continued to recite the psalms in spite of her depression and finally found comfort: “The right hand of the most highest can change all: she receaved comfort in the middest of her miseries: and after that continued very joyfull until her delivery from the same,” observed Foxe.⁷⁰ Elizabeth Lawson, although elderly and suffering from the “falling sicknes … lyved in good health, and joye of hart” during her time in prison.⁷¹

The spiritual joy and composure associated with the female prisoners were clearly results of their concentrated period of prayer, meditation, and study. Such attitudes spread infectiously from one prisoner to the next. There is the experience of the two matrons mentioned earlier who were imprisoned together at Ipswich. Anne Potten exhibited a marvelous self-confidence that must have eventually affected her companion, Mrs. Trenchfield, the brewer's wife, who did not have an easy time adjusting to prison life. A vision the night before their deaths also further strengthened Anne. Anne's piety evidently moved the brewer's wife who was filled with obvious joy as they went to the stake together.⁷² In Colchester castle prison, Rose Allen “song [sic] with great joy to the wonder of many.” Foxe comments that all the prisoners at Colchester “remayned with muche joy, and great comfort (in continuall readynge and invocatinge the name of GOD). …”⁷³ A particularly poignant example of the growth in the spirituality of women prisoners is Mrs. Prest who although simple and unlearned had people resort to her in prison, so great was the comfort she provided them as a mother confessor.⁷⁴ Friends of Joyce Lewys who spent the night before her death in prison with her observed that she was

wonderfully cherefull and mery with a certaine gravitie, in so muche that the majestie of the spirite of God did manifestly appere in her, who did expell the fear of death out of her hart, spending the time in praier, reding, and talkinge with them that were purposly come unto her for to comfort her with the word of God.

Despite two recorded instances when she briefly experienced doubt, Lewys' own deepened spirituality appears to have played a crucial role in her perseverance, although the support of the Christian community was also important for her, as it was for many women.⁷⁵

It is in the context of their final end that the strength of these martyrs' newly discovered autonomy and spiritual maturity becomes fully manifest. There are some scholars who would argue that martyrs in all ages become the subjects of group pressure or psychological disorientation, but Foxe provides little evidence that these women were the victims of such circumstances.⁷⁶ Nor did they go to their deaths in superficial conformity to the mandate of self-sacrifice that renders the Christian woman a victim before she has reached a level of personal autonomy and spiritual maturation.⁷⁷ Death in defense of their faith was the third and final process in liberation and spiritual maturation. By it, they transcended even their autonomous selves; without losing their personal identity, they became one with a higher transforming power. In freely uniting themselves with the redemptive act of sacrifice and the power of Jesus, they participated in what some modern scholars have seen as an essentially androgynous act. Elizabeth Petroff speaks of the medieval mystics' appropriation of the pain and joy of the crucifixion, but she could easily be reflecting upon the Marian martyr's experience as well when she observes:

For women who were sensitive to the emotional content of traditional images of masculinity and femininity, the participation in the crucifixion became enormously liberating, for in the crucifixion women saw a powerful male figure saving the world by suffering passively, as women suffer. The opposites of passive and active, female and male, were reconciled in this single act.⁷⁸

For Foxe, the example of women burning at the stake provided at best a justification for his original inclusion of “sely poore women” and established a clear parallel to the prominent roles of women in the early church. He continued to emphasize the passive nature of the female action, as in the passage where he described the empowerment of the women martyrs at Canterbury, when the Lord did

animate their womanyshe and wyvishe hartes, into a bolde and manlye stomacke, as he did the mother of the seven sonnes, in the Machabees, and as he hathe done also the good godly women in these our latter dayes, whose nomber in many places exceaded men.⁷⁹

Yet Foxe could not completely ignore the positive example also afforded by early female martyrs as he recounted the tale of the ancient martyr Blandina who, as she was suspended on the stake and offered to the beasts, “by the ferventnes of her prayer, … muche comforted the rest of the Sainctes, as beholdyng in her Christ, with their bodilye eyes. …”⁸⁰ Foxe also reproduced the story of another early woman martyr, Julietta, who urged the women surrounding her to

cease to accuse the fragilitye of feminine nature. What? are not we created of the same matter, that men are? Yea, after Gods image and similitude are we made, as lyvely as they. Not fleshe onelye God used in the creation of the woman, in signe and token of her infirmity and weakenes, but bone of bones is she, in token that she must be strong in the true and living God, al false Gods forsaken.⁸¹

Foxe's powerful imagery ambiguously associated women's participation in the passive action of martyrdom with the active strength of men in general and Jesus Christ in particular. The sixteenth-century martyr, Joyce Lewys, clearly imitated the powerful gospel accounts leading up to the redemptive sacrifice. Although she underwent temptation and weakness in the night before her marytrdom, her friends did not desert her. Feeling faint on the way to her stake, she accepted a drink. After prayer, in which many of the onlookers including the sheriff joined,

she toke the cup into her hands, saying. I drinke to all them that unfainedly love the gospell of Jesus Christ, and wysh for the abolyshment of papistrie: when she had dronken, they that were her frendes, dranke also. After that a great nomber, especially the weomen of the town, did drinke with her. …⁸²

The parallel between the early female martyrs and Joyce Lewys was highly appropriate. All these women had become other “Christs” whose victory pierced their superficially powerless positions.

John Foxe recognized the radicalness of Joyce Lewys' actions, but he recounted them merely as evidence of divine intervention in a woman's life. He did not concern himself with, perhaps did not even stop to consider, the arduous but liberating process by which a simple laywoman could approach imprisonment and ultimately the stake without hesitation. Most modern historians have also dealt with Foxe's stories of women in a superficial manner. Although the evidence is fragmentary, there is no doubt that under close analysis these women's lives provide substantial clues to the process of transformation from religious heteronomy to autonomy and finally self-transcendency.

What effect did Foxe's stories of female martyrs have on women in the established church that was to emerge from the Elizabethan settlement? When persecution no longer prevailed and the Protestant regime was firmly in place, the new marriage ethic suggested that women seek salvation through the patriarchal institution of the family. Foxe's martyrs' stories were edifying but served no effective role in the formation of Anglican spirituality for women. In the following century, when female nonconformists of the civil war period began assuming prominent roles in their nascent religious communities, Foxe's martyrs may have provided role models. An investigation into the spiritual role models of such sectarians may indicate a continuous thread of inspiration from the lives of early Christian female martyrs through the Tudor martyrs to a culmination in the Quaker women's espousal of a similar course of moral autonomy and spiritual growth.⁸³

The identification of God as “Mother” and “Sister,” the acknowledgement of the divine in oneself, and the perception of women as religiously and morally autonomous beings may be reflections of contemporary feminist thought, but they are not without precedent in early modern England. There Tudor women from the middling and servant classes defied the political and ecclesiastical authorities and found immortality in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Foxe's attempt to show “sely poore women” overcoming obstacles with divine aid in order to witness to the reformed faith warrants an alternative interpretation as a story of a powerful spiritual quest that led from passivity and marginality to activism and assertiveness and finally self-transcendence. From an early conversion experience quickened occasionally by the witnessing of female martyrdom, these simple women grew in knowledge and prayer, often in a community setting. Carefully weighing family obligations in the light of their commitment to their God and sometimes facing a variety of crises, they submitted to the solitude of prison life and, in many cases, death at the stake. This pattern of female spiritual maturation deserves attention because of the patriarchal and traditional nature of its written record, the obvious parallels with previous spiritual journeys and, most importantly, the insight it provides into the personal impact that the Reformation had on Tudor Protestant women.

Notes

1. John Foxe, The First (Second) Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History, Contayning the Actes and Monumentes (London, 1576), STC#11224, pp. 1944-45. Henceforth cited A & M followed by appropriate edition. (Original spelling in quoting sixteenth-century passages has been retained with some exceptions for the expansion of contractions, substituting of u for v, etc. Titles have been shortened in some cases.)

2. Roland Bainton, Women of the Reformation in France and England (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 211.

3. See Bainton's chapter entitled “John Foxe and the Women Martyrs,” ibid., 211-29; Carole Levin, “Women in The Book of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (March-April, 1981): 196-207.

4. Retha W. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation, No. 38 of Contributions in Women's Studies series, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 75-76; Elizabeth Petroff, “Discovering Biography in Hagiography: Lives of Medieval Saints,” Lady Unique-Inclination-of-the Night 1 (Summer 1976): Cycle 2, 72-86; Elizabeth Petroff, “Medieval Women Visionaries: Seven Stages to Power,” Frontiers 3 (Spring 1978): 34-45.

5. Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 152-55, discusses a model for women's spiritual liberation and maturation based upon the writings of Kierkegaard and Tillich. My elaboration of the stages of feminine growth and liberation is based partially on the stages that Kolbenschlag discusses in depth in various parts of her work.

6. Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 162.

7. Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 132-95.

8. Warnicke, Women of English Renaissance, 75; Foxe, A & M (London, 1563), STC#11222, pp. 1045, 1136, 1159-60, 1538; (1576), p. 1839. For a discussion of the Puritan marriage ethic, see Margo Todd, “Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household,” Church History, 49 (March 1980): 18-34.

9. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1571.

10. J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1940). See also Warren W. Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne, 1983).

11. Mozley, John Foxe, 152-74, 204-22; Wooden, John Foxe, 22-23.

12. Mozley, John Foxe, 139-41, 153; Wooden, John Foxe, 19.

13. Maureen Fries, “Feminae Populi: Popular Images of Women in Medieval Literature,” Journal of Popular Culture 14 (Summer 1980): 79-85.

14. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1468, 1608, 1618.

15. Ibid., pp. 1269-70, 1519, 1547, 1608, 1657. When asked her age, Alice Potkins declared that she was forty-nine, but only one year old according to her new faith. Ibid., p. 1547.

16. Ibid., pp. 1251, 1468, 1649, 1657, 1674; A & M (1576), pp. 1846-47, 1958-63.

17. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1250-51, 1604.

18. Foxe, A & M (1576), pp. 1942-3, 1858.

19. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 66-70; Patrick Collinson, “The Role of Women in the English Reformation, Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke,” Studies in Church History (London: Ecclesiastical History Society, 1965), 2: 258-72. See also Warnicke, Women of English Renaissance, 7-8, on the relative freedom of Englishwomen at this time.

20. See Davis's comments, Society and Culture, 75-76, on the religious practice of women in French urban areas, particularly the lack of involvement in church activities among lower-class women. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 19-39 indicates greater pre-Reformation involvement in English confraternities by women. Participation in confraternities depended greatly upon class, geographic location, and the nature and purpose of the organization. The question of women's involvement in confraternities warrants further investigation. See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Keepers of the Lights: Late Medieval English Parish Gilds,” Journal of Medieval and Renaisance Studies 14 (Spring 1984): 21-37.

21. Warnicke, Women of English Renaissance, 73; White, 150-51.

22. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1453.

23. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1858.

24. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1519-20.

25. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1943.

26. Warnicke, Women of English Renaissance, 75-76, suggests “that Anne Askew served as role model for these lower-class Protestant women who might not otherwise have viewed themselves as sufficiently important to die for their faith.” John Bale had published an account of Askew's interrogations as early as 1546 and Foxe later incorporated it into his own story. See Wooden, John Foxe, 18. Warnicke suggests that the impact of such a martyrdom might help to explain the large number of female martyrs recorded by Foxe, about one-fifth of the total Marian martyrs. The ratio of female to male martyrs in the years 1556 and 1557 increased steadily, according to Warnicke, Women, 74-75. See also White, Tudor Books, 135-68. For some spiritual models used by laywomen in the medieval period, see Anthony Goodman, “The Piety of John Brunham's Daughter, of Lynn” Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker, Subsidia 1 of Studies in Church History (Oxford: Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978), 350. Early English texts that provided religious models for women included Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, (London: Early English Text Society, 1938), and John Capgrave, The Life of St. Katharine of Alexandria, ed. C. Horstmann, (London, 1893).

27. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1610. White, Tudor Books, 151-52, warns that the reader must approach with caution Foxe's accounts of the effects of actual martyrdoms on bystanders. At the same time, she comments that his descriptions of reactions appear to be similar to the recorded responses of spectators at other martyrdoms.

28. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1619-20, 1633.

29. Ibid, pp. 1618-19.

30. Ibid., p. 1266.

31. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1428. Eleanor McLaughlin attributes medieval religious women's empowerment to their traditional life and commitments. Women have become empowered not by the traditional male means of authority but “at prayer, experiencing, seeking, listening, savoring, witnessing,” states McLaughlin in “The Christian Past: Does it Hold a Future for Women?” Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 96.

32. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1266, 1538.

33. Ibid., pp. 1159-60.

34. Ibid., p. 1250. Warnicke, Women of English Renaissance, 76, emphasizes the importance of the underground congregations operating in London and Colchester during Mary's reign.

35. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1604.

36. Ibid., p. 1699.

37. Ibid., pp. 1528-29.

38. Foxe does include some stories of women who were noted for their learning in the early decades of the sixteenth century and who may have been influenced by remnants of Lollardism as well. See A & M pp. 787-88; 808 (1576).

39. This connection is made in a significant article by Elaine V. Beilin, “Anne Askew's Self-Portrait in the Examinations,” Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 77-91. Petroff, “Visionaries,” 37-38, points out that the doctrinal visions of female medieval mystics enhanced their esteem in the eyes of others, even though the visions were accepted with great humility by the women themselves. See also Eleanor McLaughlin's discussion of the Anglo-Saxon Saint Lioba's holiness and learning in “Women, Power and the Pursuit of Holiness in Medieval Christianity,” Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1979), 103-8. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture, 76-80, discusses the Protestant woman's espousal of literacy that offered “a new relation with men” and a new sense of equality.

40. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1608-09.

41. Ibid., p. 1630.

42. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1944.

43. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1670-1672.

44. Foxe, A & M (1576), pp. 1961.

45. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 672.

46. See Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, Inc., 1980), 63-68.

47. Foxe, A & M (London, 1570), STC#11223, p. 89. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Feminist Spirituality, Christian Identity, and Catholic Vision,” Womenspirit Rising, 140-41, suggests that Catholic sainthood which placed service to the Lord above the duties of wives and mothers was a viable liberating model. Fiorenza points out, 141, that “Christian self-identity was derived by the early Christians from the call to become disciples of Jesus and members of the Christian community.” Elizabeth A. Clark and Herbert Richardson, Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 152, emphasize that the older medieval tradition that assumed a married woman's direct relationship with God was replaced in the Protestant tradition with a relationship channeled through the husband.

48. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1270-71.

49. Ibid., p. 1678.

50. Ibid., p. 1734 note.

51. Foxe, A & M (1576), pp. 1846-47.

52. Ibid., p. 1963.

53. Ibid., p. 1815.

54. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1631-33.

55. Foxe, A & M (1576), pp. 1859-1860.

56. Ibid., p. 1444.

57. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1619.

58. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1872.

59. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1677.

60. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1943.

61. Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 333, has found that critics during the civil war period denounced the effect of women's sectarian participation on family bonds.

62. Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye, 155, elaborates on the crisis which also becomes the threshold for entrance into the third state of spiritual maturation, that of self-transcendence. Among such possible crises, Kolbenschlag lists “illness, failure, rejection or loss, depression, a challenging task or insurmountable obstacle.”

63. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1603.

64. Ibid., pp. 1608-1609.

65. Ibid., p. 1618.

66. Ibid., p. 1697.

67. Mary Claridge, Margaret Clitherow (1556?-1586) (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), documents the growth in spirituality and learning experienced by the young Elizabethan Catholic martyr Margeret Clitherow who shared the same socio-economic background and conditions of imprisonment as many of the female Marian martyrs Foxe describes.

68. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1631-33.

69. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1872.

70. Ibid.

71. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1677.

72. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1271, 1503-4.

73. Ibid., pp. 1609-10.

74. Foxe, A & M (1576), p. 1944. See Frederick C. Klawiter, “The Role of Martyrdom and Persecution in Developing the Priestly Authority of Women in Early Christianity: A Case Study of Montanism,” Church History, 49 (September 1980): 251-61, for the role of female confessors in the early church.

75. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1620. See Dorothy Day's comment in The Long Loneliness (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1950), 73-74, quoted in Anne Fremantle, Woman's Way to God (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977), 277. Day observed that even in religion, women were social beings.

76. See Donald W. Riddle, The Martyrs: A Study in Social Control (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931), who analyzes early Christian martyrdom in its social context and proposes that the martyrs were under great pressure to conform to the Christian communities' expectations of correct behavior under pagan pressure. Seymour Byman, “Ritualistic Acts and Compulsive Behavior: The Pattern of Tudor Martyrdom,” American Historial Review 83 (June 1978): 625-43, has applied modern psychological insights, including Riddle's study, to the accounts of the Marian martyrs as provided by Foxe. Byman has also studied the lives of three male martyrs to provide evidence for his contention that martyrdom was an option for men who were pathologically ill and socially isolated. See his “Suicide and Alienation: Martyrdom in Tudor England,” The Psychoanalytical Review 61 (Fall 1974): 355-73. Although there is some evidence that the female Marian martyrs did experience alienation, separation from established social and religious norms appears as part of their total spiritual maturation that enabled them to assume control of their own lives through critical choices. Rather than a pathological alienation, female solitude exhibited growth in moral autonomy and spiritual liberation. See Sheila D. Collins, A Different Heaven and Earth (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1974), p. 17, for a contemporary analysis of this feminine process of liberation.

77. Both Collins, Different Heaven and Earth, 89, and Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace, 89-91, feel that the traditional value placed upon Christian self-sacrifice has little application for women, especially in the form imposed by patriarchal norms.

78. Petroff, “Visionaries,” 39; Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 179, observes that “the masculine in Jesus' redemptive action is complemented by this feminine strength-in-quietness—which is not passivity at all but a free and active choice.” See also Freemantle, Woman's Way to God, 255.

79. Foxe, A & M (1563), pp. 1570-71.

80. Ibid., p. 1571; A & M (1570), p. 70 (misprint for 71).

81. Foxe, A & M (1570), pp. 132-33.

82. Foxe, A & M (1563), p. 1620.

83. The female martyrs' activities, as described by Foxe, have interesting similarities with those of later English sectarians. See Richard L. Greaves, “The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity,” Church History 52 (September 1983): 299-311. For an account of the spiritual autobiographies of two seventeenth-century English Quaker women, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki, “Alice Hayes and Mary Penington: Personal Identity within the Tradition of Quaker Spiritual Autobiography,” Quaker History 65 (Spring 1976): 19-31.

This paper was first presented at the Nineteenth Conference of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1984.