The Book Of Martyrs – John Foxe
“Acts and Monuments”, commonly known as The Book of Martyrs, is a celebrated work of church history and martyrology. It was published as an affirmation of the Protestant Reformation in England during a period of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. 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 a nationalistic repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Book Of Martyrs
Format: Paperback.
The Book Of Martyrs.
ISBN: 9783849678166.
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Regarding the accuracy of The Book of Martyrs (from wikipedia.com)
Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius, Bede, Matthew Paris, and many others. Foxe’s own contribution was his compilation of the English martyrs from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources of all kinds to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses, a remarkable range of sources for English historical writing of the period.
Foxe’s material is more accurate when he deals with his own period, although it is selectively presented, and the book is not an impartial account. Sometimes Foxe copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. Although both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe presented “lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger.” Foxe’s method of using his sources “proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth.”
Foxe often treated his material casually, and any reader “must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies.” Furthermore, Foxe did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity. He made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as “Mark the apish pageants of these popelings” and “This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing”, as Foxe’s age was one of strong language s well as of cruel deeds. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica went so far as to accuse Foxe of “wilful falsification of evidence.” Nevertheless, Foxe is “factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere.” According to J.F. Mozley, Foxe presented “lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger.”
(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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