Foxes Book of Martyrs by John Foxe
When I was a little kid my house was full of books about theology and church history, and one of the books I ended up reading a little bit of was Foxe's Book of Martyrs. This book scared the shit out of me. A major reason that I initially picked it was because it was a book with pictures. Here are some of the type of pictures it has:
So yeah, as a little kid this book freaked me out. It still freaks me out.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs is around 400 pages of short descriptions of being people burned alive, pulled apart, skinned, hanged, publicly beaten, stoned, tortured, starved, drowned, and pretty much every other horrible thing that can be done to a person. There is no character development or literary detail, the book basically reads like a gigantic newspaper report.
The Book of Martyrs was a pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic book. The book starts off with Christians being crucified and ripped apart by lions as they are persecuted by the Romans. The Christian church was not an established entity then. The ironic thing is that later in the book even more Christian 'blasphemers' die at the hands of the Catholic church, which has now grown into a world power. The chapters about the Inquisition are even more gory than the chapters in which Christianity is seen as a revolutionary movement that must be stomped into nonexistence.
This is a horrific book, but the other side to it is that much of the book is about people who believed in something so strongly that they were willing to die for it. There are many reports of people who chose death and torture over renouncing their faith. For the author and the intended audience, the people that die in this book did not die pointless deaths, they are heroes and examples to us all.
I didn't read the entire book again, maybe just half of it--I mostly skimmed it. In many ways the book reminded me of 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade. The violence is so extreme and gets repeated so much that after awhile you become desensitized to it.
This is an excerpt:
The officers of the Inquisition, preceded by trumpets, kettledrums, and their banner, marched on the thirtieth of May, in cavalcade, to the palace of the great square, where they declared by proclamation, that, on the thirtieth of June, the sentence of the prisoners would be put in execution.
Of these prisoners, twenty men and women, with one renegade Mahometan, were ordered to be burned; fifty Jews and Jewesses, having never before been imprisoned, and repenting of their crimes, were sentenced to a long confinement, and to wear a yellow cap. The whole court of Spain was present on this occasion. The grand inquisitor's chair was placed in a sort of tribunal far above that of the king.
Among those who were to suffer, was a young Jewess of exquisite beauty, and but seventeen years of age. Being on the same side of the scaffold where the queen was seated, she addressed her, in hopes of obtaining a pardon, in the following pathetic speech: "Great queen, will not your royal presence be of some service to me in my miserable condition? Have regard to my youth; and, oh! consider, that I am about to die for professing a religion imbibed from my earliest infancy!" Her majesty seemed greatly to pity her distress, but turned away her eyes, as she did not dare to speak a word in behalf of a person who had been declared a heretic.
In many ways, this book is like a condensed history of the world. It didn't make me feel very endeared to humanity. It's a book that's supposed to inspire religious devotion in its readers, but it did not have that effect on me. I will say, however, that it's the type of book that makes a deep impression. It's not a book that's easily forgotten.
