Short answers, pulled from the story.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs, formally titled Actes and Monuments, is a history of Christian martyrdom with particular focus on English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century through the reign of Mary I. The first English edition, published in 1563, ran to roughly 1,800 pages and became the second most widely read book in English after the Bible.
John Foxe was born in 1516 or 1517 in Boston, Lincolnshire, and died on the 18th of April 1587. He was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in London.
Foxe resigned from Magdalen College in 1545 after converting to Protestantism, a faith condemned under Henry VIII. He opposed clerical celibacy, which he described in letters as self-castration, and faced a deadline to take holy orders by Michaelmas 1545 that he was unwilling to meet.
Four editions were published during Foxe's lifetime: in 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583. The 1570 second edition nearly doubled the size of the first, growing to two folio volumes with 2,300 very large pages of double-columned text. The 1583 fourth edition was the largest, running to about two thousand folio pages and described as the most technically demanding English book of its era.
Foxe's accuracy has been debated for centuries. His accounts of events in his own era draw on episcopal registers, trial records, and eyewitness testimony, and scholar J. F. Mozley credited him with lifelike pictures that could never have been invented by a forger. Samuel R. Maitland's 19th-century critique severely damaged Foxe's reputation, but J. F. Mozley's 1940 study John Foxe and His Book began a rehabilitation, and modern scholars, including Thomas S. Freeman, describe the work as a partisan but evidence-based account that should never be read uncritically.
Foxe fled England in 1553, sailing from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort with his pregnant wife. He then travelled through Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Frankfurt before reaching Strasbourg by July 1554, where he published the first outline of his martyrology in Latin. He later moved to Frankfurt and then to Basel, where he published the first complete Latin edition of his book in August 1559.