ABSTRACT
The broadsheet is unsparing in its depiction of the suffering endured by the Carthusian priests. Although the story of their brutal treatment and execution is recounted in the script, the greater impact is made by the explicit images which narrate plate by plate its stages: their imprisonment and humiliating journey along the streets on hurdles, the hanging and the quartering of their bodies, and the boiling and eventual exposure of their heads and limbs on the city walls. In every plate, however, there is an unexpected player, one that is given a major part in this visual narrative: the cityscape of Rome. On first seeing the broadsheet, this is puzzling; one would expect images of events that happened in England to be set in an English landscape or one which at least attempted to suggest such. Although the script is careful to state that these are English martyrs and supplies the details of exactly where in England these events occurred, no one reading the broadsheet images could be in any doubt that they are deliberately set in Rome. We see landmark buildings dating from the classical period which would have been as familiar in the Rome of 1555 as they are today. We also see buildings that are equally well known and recognisable today but were, as the broadsheet was planned and produced, either just newly completed or still works in progress. So why did those responsible for the broadsheet deliberately set the martyrdoms in Rome, and within a landscape which juxtaposes both antique and what, in 1555, were new buildings? The answer lies in the fact that this served as a visual device that allowed the priests to be shown suffering martyrdom for the faith simultaneously in their own time and in the Rome of the late third and early fourthcenturies, at the time of the persecution of the early Church by the Emperor Diocletian.
