ABSTRACT

As the Counter Reformation Church responded to the Protestant claims in the theses of the Magdeburg Centuries and Flacius’ Catalogus testium veritatis,it turned to emphasizing its own links with an earlier persecuted Church.1 The Rome which Verstegan reached in the spring of 1584 was one in which the ideal of martyrdom was fostered everywhere, from the reverence given to the ruins of the sites of early martyrdom, to relics in churches, shrines, images and, above all, to the catacombs. In 1578 the catacomb of St Priscilla, a considerable portion of which lay conveniently under a vineyard that belonged to the Jesuits, had been opened.2 It had caused an uproar, and within months it was being described as a place where ‘men can picture to themselves the persecutions, the sufferings and the piety of the saintly members of the primitive Church’, and, more pertinently, the account added: ‘it is obviously a further confirmation of our Catholic religion’.3 Anthony Munday was at the English College towards the end of 1578, and although he was ‘lying sicke in my Bed’ and had missed the visit to St Priscilla, he reported what he had heard about it and, in spite of the irony in his account, he gives a good idea of the atmosphere in Rome at this time. He had been told ‘what a Heavenlie place it was, what a number of Saintes and Martirs had beene buried there, and what precious Reliques was dailie found there’.4 As such sites as St Priscilla subtly mutated in public understanding from their identity as early Christian burial grounds

into the burial sites of the early Christian martyrs, so the remains and artefacts found there were transformed into martyr relics which, in turn, proliferated to be venerated everywhere in the churches, chapels and crypts.