This article considers the narrative and theatrical strategies used by Thomas Heywood to sanctify Elizabeth I as a virgin martyr saint in the remarkable, yet understudied, Reformation history play If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I, or the Troubles of Queen Elizabeth (ca. 1605). I examine how Heywood reads against Foxe even as he draws on the history of the English Reformation from the Book of Martyrs to create a narrative of virgin martyrdom; I discuss how the play’s miraculous theatricality re-forms past iterations of religious knowledge in drama, and show that the play recovers hagiography for English Protestantism. I conclude by suggesting that Heywood invented the Stuart saint play.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Salvo, G. M., (2025), "“A Virgine and a Martyr both”: The Turn to Hagiography in Heywood’s Reformation History Play", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Salvo, Gina M. Di. "“A Virgine and a Martyr both”: The Turn to Hagiography in Heywood’s Reformation History Play." Renaissance and Reformation 41 (4): 2019. 133-167. DOI: 10.7202/1061917ar. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.