Open AccessDeath by Honey and Bees
Author(s) -
Sarah Cavanagh
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the general brock university undergraduate journal of history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2371-8048
DOI - 10.26522/tg.v6i1.2655
Subject(s) - protestantism , persecution , irish , politics , ideology , storytelling , narrative , population , history , religious studies , spanish civil war , literature , art , media studies , law , sociology , political science , philosophy , linguistics , demography
Intense political and religious divisions plagued mid-seventeenth-century English society following the execution of King Charles I and the English civil war conflicts. Against this backdrop, a fringe, troublesome Puritan preacher named Samuel Clarke published a history of Protestant martyrs, A Generall Marytrologie (1651), modeled after John Foxe’s popular Book of Martyrs (1563). Clarke’s less famous but more sensational version offered a zealous, often embellished, graphic account of religious persecution designed to incite anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment. Significantly, his rousing text was supported by eighty crude and provocative engraved images depicting grotesque scenes of abuse and brutal sexual violence repeatedly positioning women and children as victims of “Papist” torture. To modern viewers, the inflammatory visuals are startling and disturbing, but they were enabled by several factors including a censored publishing industry in lockstep with Protestant ideology; a largely illiterate population swayed by traditions of narrative storytelling and visual messaging; and a fractious political environment in which leading figures actively positioned the Irish and Catholics as a menace to English society.