The Acts and Monuments
Encyclopedia
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 woodcut
s 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.
called it a book of martyrs, and the name stuck." 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.
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). 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 (acadenically 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. 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 The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe.
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. 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.”
(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.
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”. 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. 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.”
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.
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]". 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.
John Foxe
John Foxe was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what is popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, , an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the...
is a celebrated work of English church history and martyrology, first published in 1563 by John Day
John Day (printer)
John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms...
. The book was lavishly produced and illustrated with many woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s 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.
The question of title
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 GrindalEdmund Grindal
Edmund Grindal was an English church leader who successively held the posts of Bishop of London, Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Elizabeth I of England.-Early life to the death of Edward VI:...
called it a book of martyrs, and the name stuck." 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 FoxeJohn FoxeJohn Foxe was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what is popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, , an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the...
, The Acts and Monuments (1570) ’’’
Editions and derivative works
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.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). 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 (acadenically 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. 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 The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe.
| 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 John Day -People:*John Day , English merchant, author of a letter to the "Lord Grand Admiral" referring to the existence of the lost book Inventio Fortunata*John Day , English Protestant printer, also known as John Daye... |
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 Timothy Bright Timothy Bright, M.D. was an English physician and clergyman, the inventor of modern shorthand.-Early life:Bright was born in or about 1551, probably in the neighbourhood of Sheffield. He matriculated as a sizar at Trinity College, Cambridge, 'impubes, æt. 11,' on 21 May 1561, and graduated B.A. in... ' s Abridged Edition |
1589 | dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham |
| Clement Cotton's Abridged Edition | 1613 | titled Mirror of Martyrs |
| Rev. Thomas Mason Thomas Mason (clergyman) -Life:On his own account, he was the grandson of Sir John Mason. Mason was admitted at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 29 November 1594, matriculated on 7 January 1595. He may not have graduated; there is possible confusion with another Thomas Mason at Magdalen of the period.From 1614 to 1619 Mason... of Odiham Odiham Odiham is a historic village and large civil parish in the Hart district of Hampshire, England. It is twinned with Sourdeval in the Manche Department of France. The current population is 4,406. The parish contains an acreage of 7,354 acres with 50 acres of land covered with water. The nearest... '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 Simeon Fox Simeon Fox , M.D. was an English physician, who became President of the College of Physicians.-Life:He was the youngest son of John Foxe, and was born in the house of the Duke of Norfolk. He was educated at Eton College, and on 24 August 1583 was elected a scholar of King's College, Cambridge,... . |
| Edward Leigh Edward Leigh (writer) Edward Leigh was a versatile English lay writer, known particularly for his works on religious topics, and a politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1645 to 1648. He fought for the Parliamentary army in the English Civil War... 's Abridged Edition |
1651 | titled Memorable Collections |
| Jacob Bauthumley Jacob Bauthumley Jacob Bauthumley or Bottomley was a significant English radical religious writer, usually identified as a central figure among the Ranters. He is known principally for The light and dark sides of God . This work was regarded as blasphemous... |
1676 | Brief Historical Relation of the Most Material Passages and Persecutions of the Church of Christ |
| Paul Wright | 1785? | The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, an update to cover the 18th century |
| Edition by Stephen Reed Cattley with Life and Vindication of John Foxe by George Townsend George Townsend (clergyman) -Life:Born at Ramsgate, Kent, he was the son of George Townsend, an Independent minister there and author of published sermons. He was educated at Ramsgate, and attracted the attention of Richard Cumberland, with whose help he was able to go to Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. in 1812... , in eight volumes |
1837–41 | Much criticised by Samuel Roffey Maitland Samuel Roffey Maitland Samuel Roffey Maitland was an English historian and miscellaneous writer on religious topics. He was in Anglican orders, and worked also as a librarian, barrister and editor.-Early life:... on scholarly grounds. |
| Michael Hobart Seymour Michael Hobart Seymour Michael Hobart Seymour was an Anglo-Irish Protestant clergyman and religious controversialist.-Life:He was born on 29 September 1800, the sixth son of John Crossley Seymour, vicar of Caherelly , who married in January 1789 Catherine, eldest daughter and coheiress of Rev. Edward Wight, rector of... |
1838 | The Acts and Monuments of the Church; containing the history and sufferings of the martyrs; popular and reprinted Victorian edition. |
Influence
Following a 1571 ConvocationConvocation
A Convocation is a group of people formally assembled for a special purpose.- University use :....
order, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was chained beside the Great Bible
Great Bible
The Great Bible was the first authorized edition of the Bible in English, authorized by King Henry VIII of England to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England. The Great Bible was prepared by Myles Coverdale, working under commission of Sir Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to Henry...
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
Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion is an international association of national and regional Anglican churches in full communion with the Church of England and specifically with its principal primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury...
. Acts and Monuments sailed with England’s gentleman pirates, encouraged the Saints in Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....
’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. 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
Christopher Hill (historian)
John Edward Christopher Hill , usually known simply as Christopher Hill, was an English Marxist historian and author of textbooks....
, with others, has noted that John Bunyan
John Bunyan
John Bunyan was an English Christian writer and preacher, famous for writing The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, in the Church of England he is remembered with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on 29 August.-Life:In 1628,...
cherished his Book of Martyrs among the few books that he kept with him while imprisoned. William Haller observed that John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
'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
Elizabeth
Elizabeth or Elisabeth is the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Elisheva, meaning "God's promise," "oath of God," or "I am God’s daughter." Elizabeth and Elisabeth are the parent unit names of Lisa, Lilly, Beth, Betty, and Ella; Elsa, Isabel, and Isabella are etymologically related...
, 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.”
Position in English consciousness
The original Acts and Monuments was printed in 1563. This text, its dozens of textual alterations, and their scholarly interpretations, helped to frame English consciousnessEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
(national, religious and historical), for over four hundred years. Evoking images of the sixteenth-century martyred English, of Elizabeth
Queen Elizabeth
-Queens regnant:* Elizabeth I of England , last Tudor monarch over England, reigned 1558–1603* Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms, reigned since 1952-Queens consort, dowager and mother:...
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
Whiggism
Whiggism, sometimes spelled Whigism, is a historical political philosophy that grew out of the Parliamentarian faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The whigs' key policy positions were the supremacy of Parliament , toleration for Protestant dissenters, and opposition to a Catholic on the...
; and it influenced the seventeenth-century radical tradition
Radicalism (historical)
The term Radical was used during the late 18th century for proponents of the Radical Movement. It later became a general pejorative term for those favoring or seeking political reforms which include dramatic changes to the social order...
by providing materials for local martyrologies, ballads, and broadsheets.
In historiography
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.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”. 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. 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.”
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.
Modern reception and anniversary
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.Patrick Collinson
Patrick Collinson
Patrick Collinson CBE was an English historian, known as an authority on the Elizabethan era. His most influential work has been about Elizabethan Puritanism. He was Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996...
concluded at the third Foxe Congress (Ohio, 1999) that as a result of the "death of the author
Death of the Author
The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that...
" 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]". 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.