John Foxe produced a great deal of non-narrative writing throughout his lifetime, much of which influenced or was shaped by his massive narrative Acts and Monuments, popularly known by readers, then and now, as The Book of Martyrs. He translated (into Latin and English) sermons and treatises by Martin Luther, Urbanus Regius, Edmund Grindal, Thomas Cranmer, and others. He organized and wrote introductions for editions of works by several writers, including William Tyndale, John Frith, and Robert Barnes. He authored (in whole or in part) sermons, two manuals on memory improvement, a theological tract about the Eucharist, two treatises on Church discipline, several anti-Catholic polemics, and a commentary, unfinished at his death, on the book of Revelation. He was also a successful and charismatic London preacher. Nearly all this material is relevant to (and some of it reprinted in) Acts and Monuments, which has an aggressive religious and political agenda. Yet in this introduction to Foxe I will consider this agenda in terms of his book’s narrative operations. In Acts and Monuments, at least, Foxe is a storyteller first and foremost; he regularly refers to the polemical or theological sections of his book as ‘digressions’ from his narrative. This chapter, then, will focus on two central narrative concerns in
Foxe’s book: the attempt to reconstruct the ancient past of his nation, and the effort to fine-tune the presentation of pain suffered by martyrs in his own time. But first, because the material shape of his book is so bound up with its content, we will start with the printing history of the martyrology.1
World History
