ABSTRACT
The accessibility and appeal of the image, and its potential to convey a complex of information, afforded the English Catholics a powerful medium with which to overturn the Protestant propaganda of the scaffold, and to depict the events which took place there as martyrdom. In producing images of the ritual of public executions the Catholics capitalized on the visual fluency of their readers, whose competence had been acquired from exposure to influences as diverse as the public enactment of capital punishment, religious woodcuts and prints of martyrdom, in addition to Gregory the Great’s ‘books of the laity’, the silent picture on the wall.1 All of these had primed the eye for the images of martyrdom produced by the Catholic community.
