Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Jean Crespin's Histoire des martyrs (1554-1597) appears at first as a collection of fragments supplying historical information regarding the martyrdoms of continental Protestant men and women. However, I argue that this martyrology is far more sophisticated and coherent in its conception and execution than its episodic appearance conveys in a first reading. It aims not merely at a tendentious recounting of persecution. Rather, the text seeks to effect a veritable resuscitation of the bodies upon which it is structured, those suffocated words still contained in the stricken corpse.