ABSTRACT
The Genevan martyrologies known as the Livre des Martyrs were produced to record and commemorate the deaths of those members of the Reformed Church who had been executed for their beliefs, especially those in France and the Low Countries. Their compiler Jean Crespin, who edited the collection from 1554 to 1570, and his successors Eustache Vignon and Simon Goulart, who continued it until 1619, built the martyrologies around the idea that those who died for their faith were particularly worthy of emulation, not only in deed, but in their understanding of their religion. These works were explicitly produced to honour not the martyr, but his or her beliefs. As Brad Gregory and Andrew Pettegree have noted, the goal of these books was to educate, encourage and edify the reader, as well as to memorialise the subjects; Crespin’s prefaces and introductions repeatedly emphasise the collection’s utility, promising in his first introduction that the martyrology was compiled in the hope that ‘it will serve each of you well in a time of need of consolation or confirmation’. 1 There was also, of course, a strong element of commemoration in Crespin’s drive to collect the details of every martyr that he could. He included all the martyrs for whom he had any information, no matter how little, and encouraged his readers to send to him further material, as in 1570, when he suggested that ‘if those who may have collected memoirs, were working diligently to tell the history, it would be as useful a thing for those who live now as necessary to those who come after us’. 2
