The phenomenon of martyrdom is more than 2000 years old but, as contemporary events show, still very much alive. Think, for example, of the November 2015 Paris attacks at the ‘Stade de France’ and the ‘Bataclan Theater’, or the series of bombings which struck churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday in May 2019. What these events, and many other ones around the world, show is that martyrdom keeps resurfacing as a highly controversial and contested concept. The concept of ‘martyrdom’ becomes more and more blurred especially because religious or secular martyrdoms play an important role in current social, political and ethnic conflicts, which calls for a book that goes beyond both the insider admiration of martyrs and the partisan rejection of martyrdoms.

This book examines the canonisation, contestation and afterlives of martyrdom and connects these with cross-cultural acts and practices of remembrance in the present. Martyrdom appeals to the imagination of many because it is a highly ambiguous spectacle with thrilling deadly consequences. Imagination is thus a vital catalyst for martyrdom, for martyrs become martyrs only because others remember and honour them as such. This memorialisation occurs through rituals, documents, artefacts, art works, and performances which contribute to a culture of remembrance that canonises martyrs, and in so doing, incorporate and re-interpret traditions deriving from canonical texts and pictorial programs. The canonisation of martyrdom, therefore, has two sides. On the one hand, there is the canonisation of martyrs as heroes of a group: clusters of martyr figures are formed and the texts about them are fixated step by step. Communities of inside readers, listeners, viewers and participants in rituals commemorate the heroes as martyrs: they create, recycle and re-interpret texts and traditions until martyrs ultimately receive a canonical status, at least within their own group. On the other hand, the ongoing process of canonisation often incorporates traditions inspired by older canonical texts. At the same time, we should acknowledge that martyr figures are contested as well, not only because they are commemorated by competing communities but also because those who are martyrs in the eyes of in-groups can be traitors or terrorists for others.

Moreover, in a society where the extension of life is one of the central values, martyrdom gains material and cultural forms which are open to change and contestation.