The Scottish Reformation and the Theatre of Martyrdom

Poor John Knox felt a distinct sense of inferiority when he sat down to write the first book of his History of the Reformation in Scotland . Unlike his English friend John Foxe, he could not draw upon the stories of hundreds of martyrs and fit them into the complete history of the persecuted Church from its beginning until the present day. To make matters worse, Foxe would duplicate Knox’s labours by incorporating the stories of most of the Scottish martyrs into his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments . In his ambition to be both the historian and the martyrologist of the Scottish Reformation, Knox thought he faced an immediate and apparently overwhelming problem: that of a distinct shortage of martyrs. Yet he was quickly reassured once he began assembling the details of those who had vigorously opposed the ‘manifest abuses, superstition and idolatry’, which characterized the Catholic Church in Scodand before the Reformation. Martyrs soon began to appear before his eyes, and Knox consoled himself, ‘Albeit there be no great number, yet are they more than the Collector would have looked for at the beginning.’

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