Treatise on the Instruments of Martyrdom - How the pagans tortured the early Christians, illustrated with the forty-seven copperplates of 1591 #1010924

This edition includes:
• New English translation in a modernized edition
• Critical introduction
• 47 illustrations

Take the instruments of martyrdom one by one — the cross, the stake, the wheel, the pulley, the press, the equuleus, the iron bed, the cauldron, the gridiron — and ask of each what it was, how it was built, and what it did to a human body. That is the remarkable project Antonio Gallonio set himself, and it is what makes this book so unlike a conventional account of the early Christians.

An Oratorian priest in Rome, Gallonio catalogues the machinery of persecution under the pagan empire: not the lives of the saints, but the things the saints endured. The martyrs crowd through these pages in astonishing numbers, yet they enter as witnesses, named wherever a source reports that this instrument was used on them. Gallonio works from the acts of the martyrs, the Roman Martyrology, and the poets and jurists of antiquity — and, above all, from objects: the pincers kept in the Vatican Basilica, which he saw, touched and kissed, the gridirons of Saint Lawrence, the stones and columns still shown in the churches of Rome. He sorts the senses of a Latin word before judging, tests an instrument by what a tool can physically do, and says so plainly when he cannot carry a claim through. The result is a catalogue that reads at times like a detective's notebook, and that ends as a prayer.

This edition brings the treatise to today's reader in the language we actually speak: Gallonio's text rewritten for the present, free in form and faithful in substance, with none of his matter lost, and the Latin names of the instruments — equuleus, ungula, plumbata, culleus — kept exactly where they fall. The forty-seven copperplates run through the volume, the last of them gathering every instrument of martyrdom into a single image.

The book opens with a critical introduction, placed before the author's text, to guide you into its world.

Add it to your library, and walk through the machinery of martyrdom with a guide who never once asks you to take his word for it.