For conscience and kingdom martyrs, monarchs and the spirit of modernity in Early Modern England

Abstract

This article compares the collective commemoration of martyrs to ascertain changes in cultural understandings of the relationship between the ultimate sacrifice offered by an individual and monarchal violence. This historical comparison is used to argue that changes in the nature of Christianity transformed the popular interpretation of sovereign violence from a desecrative to a redemptive force. While cultural individualism and political statism appear in secularized modernity as contradictory impulses, their birth in early modernity was induced by coherent and entirely consistent religious worldview.