Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Summary

John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, published in English in 1563 and popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, is a history of Christian persecution with special focus on the Protestants executed in England under Mary I between 1555 and 1558. Foxe collected trial records, letters, official documents and testimony from survivors, and the expanded 1570 edition ran to more than two thousand folio pages. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury ordered copies to be placed in cathedrals, and the book was chained in many churches beside the Bible. The text in this library is not Foxe's full work but a nineteenth-century American compilation, printed by the John C. Winston Company, which abridges Foxe, modernizes his language, and continues the history to 1830. Its preface says plainly that it is a compilation and that the compilers corrected or added material. The book begins with Stephen and the apostles and the persecutions under the Roman emperors from Nero to Diocletian, then moves to persecution in Persia, the medieval and early modern Inquisition, and the treatment of Waldensians, Hussites and Protestants in Italy, Bohemia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. The centre of the book is the account of the English martyrs, from Wycliffe's followers and William Tyndale to the burnings under Mary, including John Rogers, John Hooper, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who held his right hand in the fire because it had signed a recantation. Later chapters treat the Spanish Armada, Irish massacres of 1641, sufferings of early Quakers, French Protestants after 1814 and missionaries in India and the West Indies. The tone is strongly anti-Catholic, and the compilation, like Foxe himself, presents Roman Catholic authorities almost wholly as persecutors. Historians value Foxe's documents while warning that his selection and commentary are polemical; Catholic writers from Foxe's day onward disputed some of his accounts. Readers should approach the book as a primary source for how English Protestants understood their history, which shaped national identity for centuries.

Top Lessons

• Memory and identity

  Stories of martyrdom helped English Protestants define who they were.

• Reading a polemical source

  The book combines real documents with sharp commentary.

• Courage and conviction

  The martyr accounts present steadfastness under pressure as the highest virtue.

• For the Christian reader

  For centuries Foxe's book stood beside the Bible in English churches and homes, and it shaped how English-speaking Protestants remembered the cost of the Reformation. Students should read it both as a moving witness to faithfulness under persecution (Revelation 2:10) and critically, as a work written from one side of a bitter conflict in which Christians persecuted other Christians.

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