ABSTRACT
Jean Crespin's Livre des Martyrs served several purposes. It acted as a history of the Reformed Church, describing a continuous line of martyrs and ideas back to the fourteenth century. Its principal focus, however, was on contemporary Protestant martyrs, whom it compared explicitly to the martyrs of the Apostolic Church. This was the rationale for recording their words and deeds, which were deserving of memorialisation, but also of study. For Crespin, doctrine was 'a certain mark, amongst many others' in defining one's status as a martyr and it was, in turn, a mark of pure doctrine that it was always persecuted. Even the Lutherans, a more distinct group with their own publishing history and their own political leaders, lost some of their identity to Crespin's conception of a unified Protestantism. Crespin's view of Reformed history, and the means by which he communicated Reformed teaching, proved to be influential and durable, lasting well into the seventeenth century.
