Foxe's Book of Martyrs

The Actes and Monuments, popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is a work of Protestant history and martyrology by Protestant English historian John Foxe, first published in 1563 by John Day.
It includes a polemical account of the sufferings of Protestants under the Catholic Church, with particular emphasis on England and Scotland. The book was highly influential in those countries and helped shape lasting popular notions of Catholicism there.
The book went through four editions in Foxe's lifetime and a number of later editions and abridgements, including some that specifically reduced the text to a Book of Martyrs.

Background

After the Reformation, Catholic apologists raised the issue of the novelties of Protestant doctrines, as "exploiting religious credulity for material and sexual ends." Protestant apologists such as Calvinist Anglican John Foxe "sought to establish the continuity of a proto-Protestant piety from apostolic times to the Reformation."

Bibliographic details

The book was produced and illustrated with over sixty distinctive woodcut impressions and was to that time the largest publishing project ever undertaken in England.. Their product was a single volume book, a bit over a foot long, two palms-span wide, too deep or thick to lift with only one hand given it exceeded 1500 pages, and weighing about the same as a small infant.
Foxe's own title for the first edition, is Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church. Long titles were conventionally expected at the time, so this title continues and claims that the book describes "persecutions and horrible troubles" that had been "wrought and practiced by the Roman Prelates, speciallye in this realm of England and Scotland". Foxe's temporal range was "from the yeare of our Lorde a thousand unto the tyme nowe present"
Following closely on the heels of the first edition, the 1570 edition was in two volumes and had expanded considerably. The page count went from approximately 1,800 pages in 1563 to over 2,300 folio pages. The number of woodcuts increased from 60 to 150. As Foxe wrote about his own living contemporaries, the illustrations could not be borrowed from existing texts, as was commonly practiced. The illustrations were newly cut to depict particular details, linking England's suffering back to "the primitive tyme" until, in volume I, "the reigne of King Henry VIII"; in volume two, from H "Queen Elizabeth our gracious Lady now reigning."
Foxe's title for the second edition is quite different from the first edition where he claimed his material as "these latter days of peril...touching on matters of the Church'. In 1570, Foxe's book is an "Ecclesiastical History" containing "the acts and monuments of thynges passed in every kynges tyme in this realm , specially in the Church of England". It describes "persecutions, horrible troubles, the suffering of martyrs , and other such thinges incident... in England and Scotland, and all other foreign nations". The second volume of the 1570 edition has its own title page and, again, an altered subject.
Volume II is an "Ecclesiastical History conteyning the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs" and offers "a general discourse of these latter persecutions, horrible troubles and tumults styred up by Romish Prelates in the Church". Again leaving the reference, to which church, uncertain, the title concludes "in this realm of England and Scotland as partly also to all other foreign nations apparteynyng".

Title

Actes and Monuments for almost all its existence has popularly been called the Book of Martyrs. The linking of titles is an expected norm for introducing John Foxe's sixteenth century work. William Haller observed that " Edmund Grindal called it a book of martyrs, and the name stuck." It may have contained Grindal's "book of English martyrs", 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; very few people would even have read it. Continuing this practice in academic analyses is being questioned, particularly in light of Foxe's explicit denial.
There is also evidence that the "martyr" title referred only to the abridgments, as used by John Milner, no friend to Foxe, whose major work Milner situates at the centre of efforts to "inflame hatred" against Catholics in the eighteenth century.

We find the lying Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, with large wooden prints of men and women, encompassed with faggots and flames in every leaf of them, chained to the desks of many county churches, whilst abridgements of this inflammatory work are annually issued from the London press under the title of The Book of Martyrs.

Work of the English Reformation

Published early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and only five years after the death of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was an affirmation of the English Reformation in a period of religious conflict between Catholics and the Church of England. Foxe's account of church history asserted a historical justification that was intended to establish the Church of England as a continuation of the true Christian church rather than as a modern innovation, and it contributed significantly to encourage nationally endorsed repudiation of the Catholic Church.
The sequence of the work, initially in five books, covered first early Christian martyrs, a brief history of the medieval church, including the Inquisitions, and a history of the Wycliffite or Lollard movement. It then dealt with the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, during which the dispute with Rome had led to the separation of the English Church from papal authority and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer. The final book treated the reign of Queen Mary and the Marian Persecutions.

Editions

John Foxe died in 1587. His text, however, continued to grow. Foxe himself set the precedent, substantially expanding Actes 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 " 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, and the Gunpowder Plot. The editor for the 1641 edition brought it to "the time of Charles, now King", and added a new 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.
As edition followed edition, Actes 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 the text declined, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to include mainly scholars and evangelicals. It was still sufficiently popular among them to warrant fifty-five printings of various abridgments in only a century, and to generate scholarly editions and commentary. Debate about Foxe's veracity and the text's contribution to anti-Catholic propaganda continued. Actes and Monuments survived whole primarily within academic circles, with remnants only of the original text appearing in abridgments, generically called The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe. Some copies, including that presented to Matthew Parker, were hand-coloured.

Edition	Date	Features
Strasbourg Latin Edition	1554	persecution of Lollards
Basel Latin Edition	1559	Although J. F. Mozley calls this "no more than a fragment", it has 732 numbered pages, much of it concerning the reign of Mary Tudor.
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
6th edition	1610	2 volumes; 1952 pages plus 27-page unpaginated index. Includes the Gunpowder Plot. Titled Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happening in the Church : with an vniuersall historie of the same...
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.
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
Paul Wright	1784	The New and Complete Book of Martyrs, an update to cover the 18th century
Thomas Kelly	1814	The Book of Martyrs..., "Revised & Improved by the Rev. John Malham", in folio
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.