Acts and Monuments by John Foxe is a celebrated work of English church history and martyrology, first published in 1563 by 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. Commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, one fuller title of the work in the original spelling is Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church. The larger significance of the work, however, lies in the long series of later editions and their influence.
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Acts and Monuments for almost all its existence has popularly been called the Book of Martyrs; the linking of titles is expected for introducing John Foxe's sixteenth century work. William Haller (1963) observed that "[Bishop] Edmund Grindal called it a book of martyrs, and the name stuck."[1] It may have been Grindal's "book of martyrs" (as he had conceived the project), but it was not John Foxe's. Dismayed by the popular misconception, Foxe tried to correct the error in the second edition. That his appeal was ineffective in his own time is not surprising; for contemporary researchers to continue this misleading practice is less defensible, particularly in light of Foxe's explicit denial.
"I wrote no such booke bearying the title Booke of Martyrs. I wrote a booke called the Acts and Monumentes ... wherin many other matters be contayned beside the martyrs of Christ.” – John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (1570) ’’’ [2]
John Foxe died in 1587. His text, remarkably, continued to grow. Foxe himself set the precedent, substantially expanding Acts and Monuments between 1563 and 1570. The 1576 edition was cheaply done, with few changes, but for the 1583 printing Foxe added a "Discourse of the Bloody Massacre In France [St. Bartholomew's. Day, 1572]" and other short pieces. The 1596 fifth edition was essentially a reprint of the 1583 edition. The next editor, however, followed Foxe's example and in 1610 brought the work "up to the time of King James" and included a retelling of the French massacre. The 1632 edition added a topical outline and chronology, along with a "continuation of the foreign martyrs; additions of like persecutions in these later times" which included the Spanish invasion (1588), and the Gunpowder Treason (1605). The editor for the 1641 edition brought it to "the time of Charles, now King",and added a copperplate portrait of John Foxe to accompany Simeon Foxe's "Life" of his father. The most "sumptuous" edition of 1684 anticipated James with gilt-edged, heavy bond paper and copperplate etchings that replaced worn-out woodcut illustrations.[3]
The first abridgment appeared in 1589. Offered only two years after Foxe's death, it honoured his life and was a timely commemorative for the English victory against the Spanish Armada (1588). [4] Timothy Bright's tidy summary of Acts and Monuments headed a succession of hundreds of editions of texts based on Foxe's work, whose editors were more selective in their reading. Based with greater or lesser degrees of exactitude on the original Acts and Monuments, yet influenced always by it, editors continued to tell its tale in both popular and academic venues (although a different tale was told to each gathering).
The majority of the editors knew 'Acts and Monuments' as a martyrology. Taking their material primarily from only the last two books of Acts and Monuments, generated texts that genuinely were "Book(s) of Martyrs". Characterized by some scholars as "Foxe's bastards", these Foxe-derived texts have recently received increasing attention and recognition as the actual medium through which Foxe and his ideas influenced popular consciousness. Nineteenth-century professionalizing scholars — who wanted to keep separate their (academically significant) Acts and Monuments, clear from the abridgements' "vulgar corruption" — dismissed these later editions as expressing "narrowly evangelical Protestant piety" and as nationalistic tools produced "to club Catholics". Their judgment says more about their own prejudices that it does about any of these texts, as we know very little about any of these editions. [5] Characterized most recently as "Foxe-in-action", these Foxe-derived texts have much yet to teach researchers about the nature of their subject.
As edition followed edition, Acts and Monuments or 'Foxe' began to refer to an iconic series of texts; unless constrained by a narrow band of time, Acts and Monuments has always referred to more than a single edition. The popular influence of Acts and Monuments declined, and by the nineteenth century had narrowed to include mainly scholars and evangelicals. It was still sufficiently popular among them to warrant (at least) fifty-five printings of various abridgements in only a century, to generate scholarly editions and commentary. Debate about Foxe's veracity and the text's contribution to anti-Catholic propaganda continued. Acts and Monuments survived whole primarily within academic circles, with remnants only of the original text appearing in abridgements, generically called The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe.[6]
| Edition | Date | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Strasbourg Latin Edition | 1554 | persecution of Lollards |
| Basel Latin Edition | 1559 | "no more than a fragment" on Marian martyrs |
| 1st English Edition printed by John Day | March 1563 | "gigantic folio volume" ~1800 pages |
| 2nd Edition, with John Field | 1570 | response to Catholic critics; "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" |
| 3rd Edition | 1576 | reprint, inferior paper, small type |
| 4th Edition | 1583 | last in Foxe's lifetime, "2 volumes of about 2000 folio pages in double columns" |
| Timothy Bright's Abridged Edition | 1589 | dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham |
| Clement Cotton's Abridged Edition | 1613 | titled Mirror of Martyrs |
| Rev. Thomas Mason of Odiham's Abridged Edition | 1615 | titled Christ's Victorie over Sathans Tyrannie |
| Edition of the original | 1641 | Contains memoir of Foxe, now attributed to his son Simeon Fox.[7] |
| Edward Leigh's Abridged Edition | 1651 | titled Memorable Collections |
| Jacob Bauthumley | 1676 | Brief Historical Relation of the Most Material Passages and Persecutions of the Church of Christ[8] |
| Paul Wright | 1785? | The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, an update to cover the 18th century[9] |
| Edition by Stephen Reed Cattley with Life and Vindication of John Foxe by George Townsend, in eight volumes | 1837–41 | Much criticised by Samuel Roffey Maitland on scholarly grounds. |
| Michael Hobart Seymour | 1838 | The Acts and Monuments of the Church; containing the history and sufferings of the martyrs; popular and reprinted Victorian edition.[10] |
Following a 1571 Convocation order, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals, select churches, and even several bishops' and guild halls; whereby God's truth reinforced local truth, and local truth, God's. Selected readings from the text were proclaimed from the pulpit as was (and as if it were) Scripture. It was read and cited by both ecclesiastical and common folk, disputed by prominent Catholics, and defended by prominent Anglicans. Acts and Monuments sailed with England’s gentleman pirates, encouraged the Saints in Oliver Cromwell’s army, and graced the halls at Oxford and Cambridge.
Acts and Monuments is credited as among the most influential of English texts. Gordon Rupp called it "an event". He counted it as a “normative document”, and as one of the Six Makers of English Religion.[11] Nor was Foxe's influence limited to the direct effects of his text. At least two of Rupp's "makers" continued and elaborated Foxe's views. Christopher Hill, with others, has noted that John Bunyan cherished his Book of Martyrs among the few books that he kept with him while imprisoned. William Haller observed that John Milton's Of Reformation in England, and other tracts, took “not only the substance of the account…but also the point of view straight out of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Haller means by this, “the view of history advanced by propaganda in support of the national settlement in church and state under Elizabeth, kept going by the increasing reaction against the politics of her successors, and revived with great effect by the puritan opposition to Anglican prelacy in the Long Parliament.” [12]
The original Acts and Monuments was printed in 1563. This text, its dozens of textual alterations, and their scholarly interpretations, helped to frame English consciousness (national, religious and historical), for over four hundred years. Evoking images of the sixteenth-century martyred English, of Elizabeth enthroned, the Enemy overthrown, and danger averted, Foxe's text and its images served also as a popular code. It alerted English folk to the threat in harbouring citizens who bore allegiance to foreign powers, and it laid an anchor for their xenophobia. Acts and Monuments is academically linked with notions of English nationhood, liberty, tolerance, election, apocalypse, and Puritanism. The text helped to situate the English monarchy in a tradition of English Protestantism, particularly Whiggism; and it influenced the seventeenth-century radical tradition by providing materials for local martyrologies, ballads, and broadsheets.[13]
Acts and Monuments acted as something of a Bible for English folk (commonly asserted) and also for academics (rarely acknowledged), influencing their histories, historical sensibility and consciousness to an unprecedented degree. University trained researchers professionalized the original author's findings, his facts checked and challenged, being more often proved than not in seventeenth-eighteenth century inquiries, and their findings were verified through the next two centuries. Foxe's data and vision sensibly provided a foundation for informed academic conclusions. John Strype was among the early beneficiaries, and he praised John Foxe for preserving the documents on which his own ecclesiastical history depended.[14]
Acts and Monuments substantially defined, among many other histories from John Strype onward, Arthur G. Dickens's influential The English Reformation (1964, 1989 revised), which has been characterized by a critic as “a sophisticated exposition of a story first told by John Foxe”.[15] Why should that dependency be so worthy of comment? Dickens wrote a history that was informed by facts and -- similarly to Milton -- also the substance of his text, derived directly from Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Foxe's historical vision and the documentation to support it, was taught to young Arthur, along with his fellows, as a schoolboy.
Historiography, as the study of the writing of history, is in this case subsumed in history, as that which happened in the past and continues into the colloquial present. Discussing Foxe in the constructions of historical (national/religious) consciousness has always been also a discussion about the meaning and writing of history. Approaching this subject puts researchers into a kind of liminal zone between borders, where relations slip from one category to another – from writing history, to discussing history writing (historiography), to considering collective history in human consciousness (historical consciousness and collective memory).
The text in this case has always been multiple and complex. Several researchers have remarked on how malleable, how easily mutable Foxe's text was, and so inherently contradictory, characteristics that increased its potential influence.[16] It is a difficult text to pin down, what Collinson called "a very unstable entity", indeed, "a moving target". ”We used to think that we were dealing with a book,” Collinson mused aloud at the third Foxe Congress (1999), “understood in the ordinary sense of that term, a book written by an author, subject to progressive revision but always the same book ... and [we thought] that what Foxe intended he brought about.” [17]
Through the late nineties and into the twenty-first century, the Foxe Project has maintained funding for the new critical edition of Acts and Monuments and to help promote Foxeian studies, including five “John Foxe" Congresses and four publications of their collected papers, in addition to dozens of related articles and two specialized books or more produced independently.
March 2013 will mark 450 years since Foxe's 1563 publication. Foxe's first edition capitalized on new technology (the printing press). Similarily, the new critical edition of Acts and Monuments benefits from, and is shaped by, new technologies. Digitalized for the internet generation, scholars can now search and cross-reference each of the first four editions, and benefit from several essays introducing the texts. The conceptual repertoire available for reading has so altered from that of John Foxe's era that it has been asked how it is possible to read it at all.[18]
Patrick Collinson concluded at the third Foxe Congress (Ohio, 1999) that as a result of the "death of the author" and necessary accommodations to the "postmodern morass" (as he termed it then), The Acts and Monuments "is no longer a book [in any conventional sense]".[19] If it is not a book, then what is it? We are not witnessing an end to reading. Rather, researchers are participating in the formulation of new understandings about how to read texts that aren't books, and learning to manage the emergence of subjects never before known.