Foxe's Book of Martyrs

• 1. Introduction

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  Foxe's Book of Martyrs began as a book too heavy to lift with one hand. Published in March 1563 by printer John Day, the first English edition of the Actes and Monuments ran to roughly 1,800 pages and weighed about as much as a small infant. It illustrated its account of Protestant suffering with over sixty distinctive woodcuts. It sold for more than ten shillings, which amounted to three weeks' pay for a skilled craftsman. And it made its author, John Foxe, famous almost overnight.

  But the book that made Foxe famous was not quite the book he thought he was writing. He insisted he had written no such thing as a martyrology. The title that would attach itself to his work for centuries was one he actively rejected. And the text itself would be attacked, abridged, misrepresented, defended, dismissed, rehabilitated, and finally declared by one leading scholar to no longer be a book in any conventional sense at all.

  How does a single publication become, after the Bible, the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking across the late Tudor and early Stuart period? How does a historian dismissed for centuries as a forger and a fanatic end up being called the greatest English historian of his age? Those questions run through every chapter of this story.

• 2. A Book Too Heavy to Name

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  John Foxe himself said he wrote no book called the Book of Martyrs. He put his protest in writing in the second edition: "I wrote no such the title of Martyrs. I wrote a called the Acts and... many other matters be beside the martyrs of Christ."

  The title that clung to his work came from elsewhere. William Haller, writing in 1963, traced the popular name to Bishop Edmund Grindal, who had called it "a book of martyrs" and thus made the name stick. The work may even have incorporated what Grindal had conceived as his own project, a book of English martyrs. It was not Foxe's conception.

  The title Foxe's Book of Martyrs, with the author's name embedded as if part of the title, appears first in John Kennedy's 1840 edition, and may have begun as a printing error. The earliest printed book bearing the title Book of Martyrs at all appears to be John Taylor's edition from 1631. That title did not become regularized as the default name until after 1850.

  Foxe's actual title for the first edition was a long declaration of scope: Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, describing persecutions practiced by "the Romish prelates, specially in this realm of England and Scotland, from the year of our Lord 1000 unto the time now present." By the second edition in 1570, the framing shifted. The book became an "Ecclesiastical History" covering all of England's church history across "every kynges tyme in this realm." The scope had widened. The author had changed his mind about what he was building.

• 3. The Making of a Monument

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  Foxe began his work in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI, writing first in Latin. In 1554, in exile at Strasbourg, he published a Latin forerunner emphasizing the persecution of the English Lollards in the fifteenth century. A second Latin version appeared at Basel in August 1559, published without adequate sources. Foxe later acknowledged the difficulty of writing contemporary English history while living, as he put it, "in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, and small information could be had."

  Printer John Day drove the English project at speed. Foxe complained that the text was produced at "a breakneck speed," and the physical results bore that out. The first edition was a single volume, a bit over a foot long, two palm-spans wide, and too thick to lift one-handed given its 1,500-plus pages.

  The illustrations were a deliberate technical achievement. Because Foxe was writing about his own living and executed contemporaries, the woodcuts could not be borrowed from existing texts, as was standard practice. All sixty-plus images were newly cut to depict particular details of particular events. The second edition, in 1570, expanded that visual record from sixty woodcuts to 150, and grew from roughly 1,800 pages to over 2,300 folio pages across two volumes.

  The fourth and final edition in Foxe's lifetime appeared in 1583. Described by those who have studied it as nearly four times the length of the Bible, it was characterized as "the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era" and probably the largest and most complicated book to appear during the first two or three centuries of English printing history. That same title page carried the poignant request that the author "desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer."

• 4. Purpose and Polemic

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  Published only five years after the death of Catholic Queen Mary I and early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Actes and Monuments served a specific argument in a live dispute. Foxe's account of church history asserted that the Church of England was not a modern invention but the continuation of the true Christian church reaching back to apostolic times. His temporal range ran from the year 1000 up to his own present.

  The sequence of the work, initially in five books, moved from early Christian martyrs through a brief history of the medieval church, the Inquisitions, and the Lollard movement. It then covered the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, through the break with Rome and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer. The final book treated Queen Mary's reign and the Marian Persecutions.

  Foxe made no pretense of neutrality. He annotated his own text with side glosses such as "Mark the apish pageants of these popelings" and "This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing." He did not try to make martyrs of Wyatt's followers or others executed for treason, with one exception: George Eagles, whom he described as "falsely accused."

  Catholic critics attacked the book almost immediately. Thomas Harding called it "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies. Thomas Stapleton and Nicholas Harpsfield also struck at the work. In the next generation, English Jesuit Robert Parsons continued the assault in his Treatise of Three Conversions of England, published in 1603-04. Where those critics had been reasonably accurate in their charges, Foxe removed the offending passages in the second edition. Where he could rebut the charges, he mounted what one scholar described as a vigorous counter-attack, seeking to crush his opponent under piles of documents.

• 5. A Book Ordered Into Every Cathedral

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  The upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury, meeting in 1571, ordered that a copy of the Bishop's Bible and "that full history entitled Monuments of Martyrs" be installed in every cathedral church. Church officials were further instructed to place copies in their own houses for servants and visitors.

  Following that order, Acts and Monuments was chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals, select churches, and several bishops' and guild halls. Selected readings were proclaimed from the pulpit as if the text were Scripture itself. The book sailed with England's gentleman pirates and was said to have encouraged the soldiers in Oliver Cromwell's army. Copies decorated the halls at Oxford and Cambridge.

  John Bunyan, according to William Haller, kept his Book of Martyrs among the few books he held with him while imprisoned. John Milton's Of Reformation in England, and other tracts, drew according to Haller not only the substance of the account but also the point of view straight from Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Gordon Rupp called Acts and Monuments an event, counted it a normative document, and placed it among the Six Makers of English Religion.

  John Burrow, looking across the full scope of the text's influence, ranked Acts and Monuments as, after the Bible, "the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period." That ranking would have surprised Foxe himself, who died in 1587 with his interpretation of the Apocalypse still unfinished, left incomplete in his Eicasmi.

• 6. A Historian on Trial

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  From the moment of first publication, Foxe's credibility was under attack. Detractors accused him of misusing documents, dealing falsely with evidence, and telling partial truths. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Roffey Maitland took up those charges systematically, and Foxe spent roughly a century in the mainstream reference works as a poor and unreliable historian.

  The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated that "gross blunders due to carelessness have often been exposed" and that Foxe "cannot always be exonerated from the charge of wilful falsification of evidence." The Catholic Encyclopedia, two years later, agreed that Foxe "sometimes dishonestly mutilates his documents and is quite untrustworthy in his treatment of evidence." Sidney Lee, in the Dictionary of National Biography, called him "a passionate advocate, ready to accept any prima facie evidence" and suggested he had committed plagiarism.

  J. F. Mozley's 1940 biography began to shift that judgment. Writing in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mozley acknowledged that Acts and Monuments was prolix, unsystematic, carelessly edited, and one-sided, but concluded that "it is honest and it is strong in facts" and that charges of deliberate falsification "have no substance." Patrick Collinson, whose formal acknowledgement of "John Foxe as Historian" helped fund the British Academy's new critical edition, eventually called Foxe "the greatest English historian of his age, and the greatest revisionist ever."

  The 2009 Encyclopaedia Britannica settled on describing the work as "factually detailed" and preserving "much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere." That phrase points to what historians keep returning to: whatever his biases, Foxe compiled episcopal registers, trial reports, and eyewitness testimony that would otherwise have been lost. Warren Wooden observed in 1983 that since Mozley's study, modern historians "no longer feel constrained to apologize automatically for evidence and examples drawn from the Acts and Monuments."

• 7. Afterlives and Abridgments

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  The first abridgment appeared in 1589, two years after Foxe's death, timed to coincide with the English victory against the Spanish Armada of 1588. Timothy Bright's summary was dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham and headed what became a succession of hundreds of editions drawing on Foxe's work.

  These derived texts took their material primarily from the final two books of Acts and Monuments, the volumes dealing with the Marian Persecutions. Editors generated what scholars have characterized as genuine Book of Martyrs texts, reviving famous illustrated scenes for each new generation. By the nineteenth century, Acts and Monuments had narrowed in popular reach to mainly scholars and evangelicals, but that audience still warranted at least fifty-five printings of various abridgments in a single century.

  Some scholars have called these derived editions "Foxe's bastards." Nineteenth-century academic professionals dismissed them as expressing narrowly evangelical Protestant piety and as nationalistic tools produced only to target Catholics. That characterization has itself been challenged; a study titled Reflexive Foxe: The 'Book of Martyrs' Transformed found it to be false, with Haller and Wooden reaching similar conclusions through less comprehensive survey.

  The Foxe Project, operating through the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, maintained funding for a new critical edition of Acts and Monuments and organized five John Foxe Congresses, producing four volumes of collected papers in addition to dozens of related articles. At the third of those congresses, held in Ohio in 1999, Patrick Collinson mused aloud that "we used to think that we were dealing with a book, understood in the ordinary sense of that term." His conclusion was that the Acts and Monuments, shaped by revision across four centuries, is no longer a book in any conventional sense. March 2013 marked 450 years since the first English edition, and by then the first four editions had been digitized for online search and cross-reference.