Actes and Monuments. . . . by John Foxe

Introduction by

John King
Humanities Distinguished Professor of English & of Religious Studies
Co-editor, Literature & History
Associate Editor, Reformation
The Ohio State University

John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is the largest, best illustrated, most complex, most technically demanding, and most physically imposing book published in early modern England. From the inception, it has been known as the Book of Martyrs because it centers on the experience of more than 300 Protestants who were burnt alive as heretics during the reign of Mary I (1547-53). Her notoriety among nationalistic Protestants gave rise to the epithet of “Bloody Mary.” This massive collection was published originally in 1563 by the master-printer, John Day, and with the compiler’s own revisions in 1570, 1576 and 1583. It joins the English Bible as one of the great defining books of the English Renaissance and Reformation. The fourth edition runs to two and one-half million words, about three times the length of the Bible. Exemplifying ahead of its time the postmodern celebration of textual instability and multiple authorship, this version reflects its historical moment both as an ideological construction and as an artifact of the hand-operated press. Containing an extraordinary array of genres (e.g., martyrologies, poems, fiction, speeches, tracts, biographies, historical documents, spiritual memoirs, letters, and more), this book manifests a full range of printing practices including interplay of different typefaces and fonts, marginalia, woodcuts, cross references, and indices.

Exerting a greater influence upon the consciousness of Shakespearean England than any other book aside from the English Bible and official prayer book of the Church of England, the Book of Martyrs played an important part in the implantation of Protestantism as an aspect of English national identity. Ordinary people read chained copies of it and the Bible and side by side in many parish churches. Succeeding editions published across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries addressed the concerns of those who felt threatened by the “specter” of a Roman Catholic takeover of England. Generations of English Puritans acknowledged their debt to its influence, and it crossed the Atlantic with the earliest settlers in New England. It has long been a truism to state that if a Protestant household in early modern England or New England contained no more than two books, they were probably the Bible and some version of Foxe’s text. Moreover, this aggregation of documents underwent expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to incorporate events related to the transatlantic slave trade; European imperialism in Africa, the subcontinent of India, and Polynesia; and the foundation of the American Republic. Methodical reading from those "holy" books has taken place in Protestant families from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Its impact upon worldwide Anglophone culture endures in scores of reprints, abridgments, movies, and websites. This book’s interrogation of capital punishment remains relevant during the twenty-first century. Its emphases are quite timely during an era that seems obsessed with religious controversy, “holy war,” and martyrological fervor.

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