John Foxe and the Desires of Reformation Martyrology

Through an examination of John Foxe's vast 16th-century Protestant martyrology Actes and Monuments,as well as works by other figures from the English Reformation such as John Bale and Anthony Munday, I argue that suffering offers a site for the construction of an individuated subject based on a masculinized erotic of submission. Furthermore, I contend that this eroticization of suffering produces a community of martyrs bound together by their ecstatic submission to power, which locates eroticized suffering as a key constitutive element both of evangelical Protestantism and of Elizabethan nationalist ideology.