The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology. It covers selectively the period from the 1st through the early 16th century, emphasising the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century through the reign of Mary I.
First published in 1563 by the Protestant John Day, the book was lavishly produced and illustrated with many woodcuts and was the largest publishing project undertaken in Britain up to that time. Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped mould British popular opinion about the nature of Catholicism for several centuries. William Haller has argued that the Acts and Monuments is a complex book, both a reconceptualisation of the history of England and a portrait of the English church as an elect people whose history of suffering and dedication to the pure faith echo the history of Israel in the Old Testament.[1]
Contents |
Published early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and only five years after the death of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, Foxe's Book of Martyrs was an affirmation of the Protestant Reformation in England during a period of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Foxe's account of church history asserted a historical justification intended to establish the Church of England as a continuation of the true Christian church rather than a modern innovation, and it contributed significantly to a nationalistic repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church.
The sequence of the work, initially in five books, covered first early Christian martyrs, a brief history of the medieval church, including the Inquisitions, and a history of the Wycliffite or Lollard movement.[2] It then dealt with the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, during which the dispute with Rome had led to separation of the English Church from papal authority and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer. The final book treated the reign of Queen Mary and the Marian Persecutions.
Foxe began his work in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI. Over the next thirty years, it developed from small beginnings (in Latin) to a substantial compilation, in English, filling large folio volumes.
In 1554, in exile, he published in Latin at Strasburg a foreshadowing of his major work, emphasising the persecution of the English Lollards during the 15th century; and he began to collect materials to continue his story to his own day. Foxe published the version in Latin at Basel in August 1559, lacking sources, with the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs as "no more than a fragment."[3] Of course, it was difficult to write contemporary English history while living (as he later said) "in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, [and] small information could be had."[4] He made a reputation through his Latin works.[5] Both these versions were intended as the first volume of a two-volume work, the second volume to have a broader, European scope. Foxe did not publish these works; but a second volume to the Basel version was written by Henry Pantaleon (1563).[6]
In March 1563, Foxe published the first English edition of The Actes and Monuments from the press of John Day.[7] It was a "gigantic folio volume" of about 1800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin book.[8] As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments.[9] Publication of the book made Foxe famous; the book sold for more than ten shillings, three weeks' pay for a skilled craftsman, but with no royalty to the author.[5][10]
The second edition appeared in 1570, much expanded. New material was available, including personal testimonies,[5] and publications such as the 1564 edition of Jean Crespin's Geneva martyrology.[11] John Field assisted with research for this edition.[12]
Acts and Monuments was immediately attacked by Catholics, including Thomas Harding, Thomas Stapleton, and Nicholas Harpsfield.[13] In the next generation, Robert Parsons, an English Jesuit, also struck at Foxe in A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603–04). Harding, in the spirit of the age, called Acts and Monuments ' "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies'.[14] In the second edition, where the charges of his critics had been reasonably accurate, Foxe removed the offending passages. Where he could rebut the charges, "he mounted a vigorous counter-attack, seeking to crush his opponent under piles of documents."[15] Even with deletions, the second edition was nearly double the size of the first, "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" of double-columned text.[16]
The edition was well received by the English church, and 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 and that church officials place copies in their houses for the use of servants and visitors. The decision repaid the financial risks taken by Day.[17]
Foxe published a third edition in 1576, but it was virtually a reprint of the second, although printed on inferior paper and in smaller type.[18] The fourth edition, published in 1583, the last in Foxe's lifetime, had larger type and better paper and consisted of "two volumes of about two thousand folio pages in double columns." Nearly four times the length of the Bible, the fourth edition was "the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era. It seems safe to say that it is the largest and most complicated book to appear during the first two or three centuries of English printing history."[19] At this point Foxe began to compose his interpretation of the Apocalypse; he wrote more in Eicasmi (1587), left unfinished at his death.[20]
The 1583 title page included the poignant request that the author "desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer."[21]
The earliest abridgment was prepared by Timothy Bright and issued, with a dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1589.[22] The Mirror of Martyrs by Clement Cotton was published in 1613.[23] Another, by the Rev. Thomas Mason of Odiham, appeared, under the title of Christ's Victorie over Sathans Tyrannie, in 1615. Slighter epitomes followed later, such as Edward Leigh's Memorable Collections (1651).[22]
After Foxe's death, the Acts and Monuments continued to be published and appreciatively read. John Burrow refers to it as, after the Bible, "the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period."[24]
By the end of the 17th century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only "the most sensational episodes of torture and death" thus giving to Foxe's work "a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author's intention."[5] Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church Anglicanism, the book's credibility was effectively challenged in the early 19th century by a number of authors, most importantly Samuel Roffey Maitland.[5][25] Dominic Trenow O.P. commented on Foxe's lost credibility across denominations, citing Maitland and Richard Frederick Littledale, as well as Robert Parsons and John Milner.[26] In the words of this Victorian Catholic priest, after Maitland's critique and others of the time, Foxe's historical influence had been diminished so that "no one with any literary pretensions...ventured to quote Foxe as an authority."[27]
The publication of J. F. Mozley's biography of Foxe in 1940 reflected a change in perspective that reevaluated Foxe's work and "initiated a rehabilitation of Foxe as a historian which has continued to this day."[5] A new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments appeared in 1992.[28]
Foxe often treated his material casually, and any reader "must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies."[29] The material contained in the work is generally accurate, although selectively presented. Sometimes he copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. While both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe presented "lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger."[30]
Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius, Bede, Matthew Paris, and many others. He compiled an English martyrology from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses.[5] In the work of collection Foxe had Henry Bull as collaborator.[31] The account of the Marian years is based on Robert Crowley's 1559 extension of a 1549 chronicle history by Thomas Cooper, itself an extension of a work begun by Thomas Lanquet. Cooper (who became a Church of England Bishop) strongly objected to Crowley's version of his history and soon issued two new "correct" editions.[32]
The book's credibility was challenged in the early 19th century by a number of authors, most importantly Samuel Roffey Maitland.[5][25] Subsequently Foxe was considered a poor historian, in mainstream reference works. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica accused Foxe of "wilful falsification of evidence"; two years later in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Francis Fortescue Urquhart wrote of the value of the documentary content and eyewitness reports, but claimed that Foxe "sometimes dishonestly mutilates his documents and is quite untrustworthy in his treatment of evidence".[33]
In contrast, J. F. Mozley maintained that Foxe preserves a high standard of honesty, arguing that Foxe's method of using his sources "proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth."[34] The 2009 Encyclopædia Britannica notes that Foxe's work is "factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere."[35]
Foxe's book is in no sense an impartial account of the period. He did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity, but made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as "Mark the apish pageants of these popelings" and "This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing."[36] David Loades has suggested that Foxe's history of the political situation, at least, is 'remarkably objective'. He makes no attempt to make martyrs out of Wyatt and his followers, or anyone else who was executed for treason, except George Eagles, who he describes as falsely accused."[37]
Sidney Lee writing in the Dictionary of National Biography called him "a passionate advocate, ready to accept any primâ facie evidence". Lee also listed some specific errors and pieces of plagiarism.[22] In developing the same metaphor, Thomas S. Freeman argues that Foxe "may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."[5]
For the English Church, Foxe's book remains a fundamental witness to the sufferings of faithful Christians at the hands of the anti-Protestant Roman Catholic authorities and to the miracle of their endurance unto death, sustained and comforted by the faith to which they bore living witness as martyrs. Foxe emphasizes the right of English people to hear or read the Holy Scripture in their own language and receive its message directly rather than as mediated through a priesthood. The valour of the martyrs in the face of persecution became a component of English identity.
Roman Catholics consider Foxe a significant source of English anti-Catholicism, charging among other objections to the work, that the treatment of martyrdoms under Mary ignores contemporary mingling of political and religious motives — for instance, ignoring the possibility that some victims may have intrigued to remove Mary from the throne.[38]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Foxe, John". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.