Words and Images: Verstegan’s “Theatre of Cruelties”

The subject of the article is Verstegan’s “Theatre of Cruelties” (in its Latin and French versions, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis and Théâtre des cruautez des hereticques de nostre temps, published in 1587 and 1588 respectively), a booklet showing and illustrating the persecution of Catholics in painstaking and painful detail, and thereby seeking to promote the reader’s emotional response. After reminding us that the theatre-metaphor was employed in many fields of Renaissance science, Zacchi proceeds to reconstruct the compositional history of the “Theatre of Cruelties”, which is read as a Catholic answer to the well-known Protestant martyrologies produced in England by John Foxe, Thomas Cooper and Jean Bodin. Much as it loses itself in the particulars of Verstegan’s ‘visual rhetoric’, Zacchi’s reading never loses sight of the contemporary forces giving shape to his textual tactic – in particular, the Jesuits’ deployment of theatrical techniques and pictorial policies as symbolic weapons on the religious battlefield of Europe.