The Acts and Monuments of the Church V3

John Foxe or Fox (1518-1587), a staunchly Protestant divine, wrote his book as this story seen from the Protestant point of view. The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was first published in English in 1563. (see the Bibliographic Note). In this enormously long history of the Church from the death of Christ to the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, he is anxious to prove firstly the complete hatefulness, evil and corruption of the Catholic church, the papacy and the monastic orders, and secondly to assert the right of the monarch to appoint bishops and clergy, and to dispose of church property and income at will. Everything (and that means everything) which supports this view goes in; everything which does not is either left out, glossed over, or rejected as ipso facto untrue because asserted by his opponents. For example, his treatment of Savanarola is breathtaking in its omissions. To read Foxe's account, one would think that Savanarola was a humble monk, plucked from his cell and burned for preaching a few sermons - there is not a word about his capture of the government of Florence, theocratic rule (with bonfires of vanities, ) nor of his inciting a French army to invade Italy and occupy Florence; still less of his claims to possess miraculous powers. When Foxe's sources support his prejudices, however, his credulity knows no bounds; he is as ready to peddle the myth of Jewish blood-sacrifices of Christian children as he is to believe in the foundation of the church in England by Joseph of Arimathea. When he gets closer to his own times, however, his accounts are in most cases taken from eye-witness evidence or official documents and must be accepted as basically factual in most cases. There is no doubt that Protestants were savagely persecuted by Henry VIII and especially by Mary I and that this contributed to the fear and hatred which animates the book. The gruesome and enormously detailed accounts of the trials and martyrdoms of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and all the other victims of Bloody Mary's tyranny are sober fact. Nonetheless, any students tempted to regard the book as a work of history are warned to check anything Foxe says with some more even-handed historian before reproducing it. We recommend Reformation: Europe's House Divided by Diarmaid MacCulloch for a general overview or Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy for a more detailed account of the Marian persecutions