John R. Knott

Discourses of martyrdom in English literature, 1563-1694

1. John Rogers and the drama of martyrdom 2. Heroic suffering 3. The holy community 4. Separatists and factious fellows 5. Milton and martyrdom 6. Bunyan and the language of martyrdom 7. George Fox and Quaker sufferings Epilogue: The hymns of Isaac Watts.

John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering

John Foxe rejected the early Christian and medieval emphasis on the exceptional nature of martyrs and on the disjunction between vulnerable body and transported soul, focusing instead on the human qualities of his Protestant martyrs and the communal experience of the persecuted faithful, which becomes the locus of the sacred. He avoided the miraculous in attempting to reconcile representations of horrific suffering with traditional affirmations of the inner peace and joy of the martyr. Much of the drama of the Acts and Monuments arises from intrusions of the ordinary (the gesture of wiping a sooty hand on a smock) and the unpredictable (a fire that will not burn). It is Foxes deviations from the unwritten script of martyrdom and his occasional inability to contain the horror of a scene with assertions of spiritual triumph that give his narrative its power.

Milton's Wild Garden

WHEN I published Milton’s Pastoral Vision a little over thirty years ago, I was taken by the subtlety with which Milton had reinterpreted the rich literary tradition of the earthly paradise in representing the Garden of Eden, incorporating the rhetorical tropes by which poets had established an ideal landscape (a stream, flowers, shade trees, fragrant breezes, birdsong) and conventional features of the earthly paradise going back at least to Ovid (eternal spring, thornless roses, simultaneous flowers, and fruit) and blending them into a fluid, dynamic, joyous natural world. And I noted the way that the life of Adam and Eve, at least in some aspects, embodied a sense of timeless ease associated with pastoral poetry, what Virgil called otium.Their ‘‘happy rural seat of various view’’ (4.247) has the look of an English Arcadia, with a pleasing alternation of hill and valley, sun and shade, and ‘‘Flocks / Grazing the tender herb’’ (4.252–53). With its flowery banks, shady bowers, and alleys of stately trees that afford ‘‘pleasant walks,’’ the Garden offers variety and sensuous delight within the context of what appears an ordered, knowable place where, as Northrop Frye once said, we cannot lose our way. As I think about Milton’s Eden now, however, I am more struck by his emphasis on its wilder aspects, apparent in his insistence that the natural world in which Adam and Eve find themselves is fundamentally untamed, ‘‘Wild above Rule or Art’’ (5.297). Some critics have found the influence of the English countryside in Milton’s Eden or have seen it as anticipating the English landscape garden that came into its own in the eighteenth century. Others have ar-