The book now known as "Foxe's Book of Martyrs" was the most important and popular of these Elizabethan accounts. It profoundly shaped the history and meaning of English Protestantism—and indeed provoked its Catholic adversaries like Giovanni Baptista Cavalleri and Richard Verstegan to produce their own "martyr books" in response. Though much less well known today than it once was, Foxe’s book was one of the key texts through which popular Protestantism in England recognized itself and its heritage. The popular name is at once accurate and misleading: it tells us a great deal about the ways the book came to be circulated and used, yet it also conceals some important things, in particular the collaborative character of the book's production, and its larger intellectual intentions in displaying the English Church.

Deriving from two earlier Latin prototypes published outside England, the first English version of the book was published by its author, John Foxe, in 1563. He titled it Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, touching Matters of the Church, a title which, with various elaborations, persisted through the nine editions of the work until 1684. Based on Foxe's own research and collection of eye-witness accounts, the book painted a set of vivid pictures of the attack on the reformed Church and its faithful under Mary, supplementing its stirring prose with an astonishing series of woodcuts specially commissioned by its printer, John Day, who became in effect Foxe's collaborator during both their lives.

Almost immediately Foxe’s martyrology became a key official text of the Elizabethan propaganda war against Rome; to this end Foxe went so far as to recuperate the religiously pragmatic Henry VIII. Copies of the book were ordered placed in every cathedral in England and were to be found in many private houses, both ecclesiastical and lay. The details of Foxe's more stirring narratives—for example the deaths of Cranmer, Bilney, Latimer and Ridley—were very widely known. Because of the book’s popularity, Foxe’s villains, such as the fat, sadistic Bishop Bonner, took on the lineaments of popular stereotype. Enterprising writers produced several abbreviated versions of Foxe's book, suitable for more ordinary use than the huge tomes of the main edition. One poet, John Taylor, even managed to squeeze his Foxe into mnemonic rhyming couplets cut down to fit a single printer's sheet and produced as a tiny 64mo text, which was also called The booke of martyrs.

Though the Marian persecution was thus clearly the center of the book from the first, the second and greatly expanded edition of 1570 made a larger sense of recent events by attaching them to a vast narrative portraying the Christian Church as a persecuted Church from the very beginning. The book became therefore much more than a list of local deaths; it was an attempt at a universal history of the shape of Christianity itself, with England the most recent example of the perennial sufferings of Christ's faithful at the hands of the ungodly. Accordingly, without at all relinquishing its contemporary polemic function, the 1570 edition was titled The...Ecclesiastical History, conteyning the Actes and Monuments of Martyrs... , in effect a justification of the English Church on historical and theological grounds.

Foxe continued to revise and expand his work throughout his life, adding new sources as he found them or as new events succeeded, visiting Day's printshop every Monday to consult on production. In the first four editions produced during Foxe’s lifetime, the work became in an important sense a corporate cultural enterprise, central to the ongoing message of English Protestantism. After Foxe's death in 1587 it continued to grow under the hands of his successors. Foxe's prose was supplemented by new researches, and Day's dramatic woodcuts were carefully re-used for each edition until they had to be recut for that of 1641, which also included a biography of Foxe himself.

This title page from the 1596 edition, used in all editions before 1684, shows the apocalyptic and universal framework within which Foxe and Day conceived their work. The scene is the Last Judgment with Christ enthroned on the world and surrounded by trumpeting angels as he welcomes the blessed, below him on his right, into Heaven, and consigns the damned, on his left, to Hell. Each of these paradigmatic groups is refigured down its respective side of the main title: the blessed martyrs in their flames blow trumpets of praise like their crowned counterparts above. The bishops and friars on the other hand make ungodly noise through their own wind instruments at the idolatrous spectacle of the Roman Mass, like their tonsured fellows above being haled away by laughing demons. At the bottom, furthest away from the final clarity of Judgment but marked always by its polarizing rigor, these versions of holy and unholy sound and action are further embedded in contrasting scenes of contemporary Church practices: a Protestant sermon and godly men and women reading or facing the glorious Word is contrasted with Roman Catholicism's empty words, superstitious rosary-praying, processions, idolatry, and spiritual slumber. The book's visual framing of the stakes is immediate and clear.

The allegorical-historical portrait of Henry VIII as Defender of the Reformed Faith, first included in the 1570 edition of Foxe, follows the visual logic of the famous title page. Though Henry's record as a reformer was very uneven, Foxe and Day chose to depict him as a zealous crusher of the Pope. Many of the key figures of the early days of the English Reformation are depicted here in positions appropriate to the overall polemic. The central, superior position of Christ-in-Judgment is occupied by the sword-wielding Henry, who stares straight out as he receives the English Bible from Archbishop Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, and two others on his right. Beneath his feet he throws down and crushes Pope Clement VII, who is assisted by Bishop John Fisher and Cardinal Reginald Pole, English adherents of the Roman cause. A crowd of grimacing, gesticulating, weeping clerics occupies Henry's left side, while non-clerical onlookers reserve judgment behind. The role of the English monarchy in sponsoring religious reform is clearly articulated here, a role reprised by Henry's daughter Elizabeth, who appears in another illustration in a similar posture and who was the dedicatee of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.

The image here is of a very specific scene—the burning of the defrocked Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, in Broad Street, Oxford, on 21 March 1556. The illustration depicts the dramatic moment when Cranmer, who had just repudiated his earlier recantation of his heretical views, thrust first into the fire, as he had promised, the right hand which had signed the recantation paper. Next to him stands a Spanish friar, who had accompanied him to the stake to admonish him, and opposite sit secular officials attending the burning. Such burnings, in which convicted heretics were often burned in their own towns, became highly unpopular, as here the severely blank faces behind the lords may suggest. Such highly theatrical images as this fixed in the minds of Foxe's readers the specific history of their Church.

In contrast to such a specific event, even the generic and anonymous images of martyrdom in the book offer the start fact of death and transfiguration as an imaginative possibility for the ordinary reader's apprehension. Though Foxe himself seems to have been of a tolerant temper, appalled at the carnage he so carefully described, such an image can tell us a great deal about the emotional resonance of martyrdom for the Protestant believer. Reading Foxe was not merely historical, but also spiritual instruction.

For more information on John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments consult “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” by Mark Breitenberg in Renaissance & Reformation (n.s., 13, no. 4, 1989), “Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” by Patrick Collinson in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), “John Foxe and the Defence of the English Church,” by Jane Facey in Protesantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, edited by Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London: Croon Helm, 1987), “Texts, Lies and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” by T.S. Freeman in Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999), Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 by Knott, John R. (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History edited by David M Loades (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999), “The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in The Book of Martyrs,” by Ellen Macek in the Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988), Religion and Culture in Renaissance England edited by Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Generic Contradiction and Narrative Strategy in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” by D. R. Woolf in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, edited by Thomas F Mayer and D. R. Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

Visit The John Foxe Project website.