front cover of The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs
The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs
Emma Anderson
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the 1640s--a decade of epidemic and warfare across colonial North America--eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men, known to the devout as the North American martyrs, would become the continent's first official Catholic saints. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church.

In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored and preserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination over the centuries. As rival shrines rose to honor the martyrs on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.

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Le Martyre de Pionios
Pretre de Smyrne
Louis Robert
Harvard University Press, 1994

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The New Prophecy and "New Visions"
Evidence of Montanism in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (Patristic Monograph Series, Volume 18)
Rex D. Butler
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
In this book, Rex D. Butler examines the Passion for evidence of Montanism and proposes that its three authors--Perpetua, Saturus, and the unnamed editor--were Montanists.
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The One Thomas More
Travis Curtright
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
The One Thomas More carefully studies the central humanist and polemical texts written by More to illustrate a coherent development of thought.
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Saints at the Limits
Seven Byzantine Popular Legends
Stratis Papaioannou
Harvard University Press, 2023

A collection of medieval tales of Byzantine saints, including some rejected by the Church, translated into English for the first time.

The legends collected in Saints at the Limits, despite sometimes being viewed with suspicion by the Church, fascinated Christians during the Middle Ages—as related cults, multiple retellings, and contemporary translations attest. Their protagonists span the entire spectrum of Byzantine society, including foreigners, soldiers, ascetics, lustful women, beggars, and the sons and daughters of rulers. They travel to exotic lands, perform outlandish miracles, suffer extraordinary violence, reject family ties, save cities, destroy absolute rulers, and discover the divine. Some saints, like Markos the Athenian, are forgotten nowadays; others, like Saint George the Great Martyr, still command a wide appeal. Each, however, negotiates the limits of Byzantine imagination: the borders that separate the powerful from the outcasts, the real from the imaginary, the human from the beyond human. These stories, edited in Greek and translated into English here for the first time, continue to resonate with readers seeking to understand universal human fears and desires in their Byzantine guise.

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Salvation at Stake
Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe
Brad S. Gregory
Harvard University Press, 2001

Thousands of men and women were executed for incompatible religious views in sixteenth-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively for the first time, providing a compelling argument for the importance of martyrdom as both a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

Brad S. Gregory explores Protestant, Catholic, and Anabaptist martyrs in a sustained fashion, addressing the similarities and differences in their self-understanding. He traces the processes and impact of their memorialization by co-believers, and he reconstructs the arguments of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities responsible for their deaths. In addition, he assesses the controversy over the meaning of executions for competing views of Christian truth, and the intractable dispute over the distinction between true and false martyrs. He employs a wide range of sources, including pamphlets, martyrologies, theological and devotional treatises, sermons, songs, woodcuts and engravings, correspondence, and legal records. Reconstructing religious motivation, conviction, and behavior in early modern Europe, Gregory shows us the shifting perspectives of authorities willing to kill, martyrs willing to die, martyrologists eager to memorialize, and controversialists keen to dispute.

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A Thomas More Source Book
Gerard B. Wegemer
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
This Source Book brings together classic texts by and about Thomas More--poet, scholar, statesman, family man, educational reformer, philosopher, historian, and saint
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