Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first English edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, officially titled Actes and Monuments, was published in March 1563 by printer John Day. Foxe had published earlier Latin versions at Strasbourg in 1554 and at Basel in August 1559.
John Foxe, a Protestant English historian, wrote Actes and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Foxe himself objected to the martyrology title, and the name "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" with the author's name as part of the title appears first in John Kennedy's 1840 edition.
The first English edition of 1563 ran to roughly 1,800 pages and weighed approximately as much as a small infant. The fourth and final edition in Foxe's lifetime, published in 1583, spanned two volumes of about 2,000 folio pages in double columns and was described as nearly four times the length of the Bible.
Yes. The upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury, meeting in 1571, ordered that Acts and Monuments be installed in every cathedral church. Church officials were also instructed to place copies in their own houses for servants and visitors, and the book was chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals and guild halls.
Scholarly opinion has shifted significantly over time. In the early twentieth century, Foxe was widely regarded as untrustworthy, but J. F. Mozley's 1940 biography began rehabilitating his reputation. The 2009 Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the work as factually detailed and preserving much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere. Patrick Collinson called Foxe the greatest English historian of his age.
Acts and Monuments is ranked, after the Bible, as the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period. John Bunyan kept it among his few books while imprisoned. John Milton drew both the substance and the point of view of his Of Reformation in England directly from Foxe. Gordon Rupp counted it among the Six Makers of English Religion.