i

In 1583, Niccolò Circignani (1516–1596) was commissioned to paint a martyrdom cycle of thirty-four frescoes for the chapel of the Venerable English College in Rome. The murals, along with the chapel, have since been destroyed; however, they were memorialised in a series of engravings by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri (1525–1601) and published the following year in folio as Ecclesiae Anglicanae trophaea (Rome, 1584). Cavalieri's lavish illustrations recount the history of the Catholic church in England through the heroic deaths of its martyrs, beginning with St Alban (d. ca. 305?), protomartyr Anglorum of Roman Britain, and ending with the contemporary incidents of martyrdom from the English Mission. The images are awash in violence, vividly depicting mutilations, decapitations, and executions. Three of them are dedicated to the hanging, drawing, and quartering of the English Jesuits Edmund Campion (1540–1581) and Alexander Briant (1556–1581), and English College alumnus Ralph Sherwin (1549/50–1581) just a few years earlier. They had been caught trying to convert Elizabethan England back to Catholicism and paid for it with their lives. Yet they had not completely failed their mission: the engraving depicting their torture bears the inscription ‘Horum constanti morte aliquot hominum millia ad Romanam Ecclesiam conversa sunt’ (Fig. 10.1). The message is clear: it was through witnessing the Catholic martyrs’ defiance against death that thousands of Protestants had been converted to the Catholic Church. Martyrdom through public torture, theatrum crudelitatum, was part of the machinery of conversion.

Decades later, another theatre of cruelty would play out within the College walls, this time in the form of an academic comedy featuring as its protagonist a square desperate to be converted into a circle, and willing to endure torture in the process. With geometric shapes and instruments as its characters, the play seems innocuous enough. However, it is surprisingly effective in throwing into relief changing attitudes not only towards martyrdom but also towards instruments during a pivotal period for natural philosophy in the early seventeenth century.

ii

Blame Not Our Author has survived in a small quarto manuscript in the Archives of the English College. As its title page is missing, its date and author remain unknown. Its modern editor has named it from the opening lines of the

prologue and dated it to sometime between 1613 and 1635 based on watermark, inscriptions, and internal evidence.