[In the following essay, Woolf discusses Foxe's narrative strategy and explores problems of structure in the author's history of Protestant martyrs.]

For oftentimes the will and pleasure of God is to beautifie and adorn his kingdom with the weake and simple instruments of this world: such as in the olde Testament Amos was, who with many other of obscure and unknowne names, were called from the heards and foldes to the honour of the prophets: as likewise we read of the Apostles that were called from Fishermens craft, and put into Churches.¹

Flowing over some two thousand folio pages and several hundred thousand words in the fourth edition of 1583, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church (the title of the first edition of 1563), better known as the “Book of Martyrs,” chronicles the agonies of the true Church of Christ from apostolic times, through a series of persecutions by Roman emperors, medieval popes, and English monarchs, climaxing in the most notorious of all English persecutions, that of Bloody Mary between 1553 and 1558. A great deal has been written about Foxe, his religious views, his historical methods, and his attitude to the past.² Many critics, beginning in Foxe's own time, have noted the ambiguities and confusions in his book; one recent author finds in the work a “critical malaise” symptomatic of a “general disorder.”³ The purposes of this chapter are to explore the problems of structure and order in Foxe's history by examining some previously overlooked aspects of his narrative strategy, including his use of medieval and Renaissance historical and literary models, and to address the rhetorical tensions that the Book of Martyrs reveals. In reading Foxe I am beginning with the following assumptions that I would hope do not require defense here: first, that any writer may borrow a variety of literary elements from the cultural conventions shared by himself and his readers;⁴ second, that to draw on the conventions or the contents of a particular genre in no way obliges one to obey the rules of that genre, much less simply to create another example of it; and third, that early modern audiences, for all their sensitivity to matters of rhetoric and poetics, and perhaps because of it, were entirely capable of reading and responding to a complex narrative that mixes story forms and that freely uses or discards narrative conventions. Having stated these as starting points, I shall argue that any attempt to analyze Foxe's book according to a single inherited formal genre, or even a set of genres, oversimplifies the work, and that instead of imitating genres, Foxe's narrative strategy depends rather on following them, appropriating from them elements of plot, trope, and character that would resonate with his readership.⁵ By analyzing the book in this way—by complicating our reading of the Acts and Monuments—we may end up closer to a sense of the ways in which Foxe would have been understood by his own socially heterogeneous audience.⁶

HISTORY, HAGIOGRAPHY, AND THE LIMITS OF GENRE

Among the medieval works on which Foxe could draw, the most obvious candidates were the various ecclesiastical historians from whom he drew the bulk of his early material, from Eusebius through Bede and Otto of Freising to the Protestant chroniclers Johann Carion and Johann Sleidan and, for the early and high medieval periods, the important Magdeburg Centuries initiated by Matthias Flacius Illyricus and written by a group of his associates. At one level, the Acts and Monuments, is simply a Protestant ecclesiastical history, differing from most medieval and sixteenth-century chronicles principally in the greater degree to which it subordinates secular events to a redemptive time scheme running inexorably toward the reformation on earth that must precede the arrival of the New Jerusalem. Foxe assuredly set out, as suggested by the title of the earliest, Latin edition of his work, Commentarii Rerum in ecclesia gestarum, to be the Eusebius of his own time, and there can be little doubt that among early Christian historians, the bishop of Caesarea exercised on his sixteenth-century successor a very strong influence, in particular as a guide to the proper selection and sorting of materials. Yet merely to assent to the obvious, that the Acts and Monuments is indeed an ecclesiastical history of Eusebian ambition and scope, will not get us terribly far. For one thing, such a flat assertion of genre provides little aid in understanding some of the problems that Foxe faced in writing the lives and deaths of several hundred men and women, ancient and modern, linked solely by their willingness to suffer for their faith (problems with which Eusebius, writing about a much shorter period and without the burden of twelve hundred years of medieval literature, had not to deal). For another, Foxe's very relationship to Eusebius, his earliest and greatest historiographic exemplar, is itself much more ambiguous than has been acknowledged, as indicated in subtle changes to the contents and the physical arrangement of successive editions of the Acts and Monuments. Although through virtually all the editions Foxe maintained his claim to be a historian and his work to be a universal history, he does not press this point throughout the work, nor as strongly in later editions. In 1570, for instance, he added a Eusebian-style preface “To the true Christian reader, what utilitie is to be taken by readyng of these Historyes,” justifying his avoidance of the high politics and war that traditionally occupied the humanist historian. The “history” of this preface has become, in the 1576 edition, merely an address “To the Christian reader,” and by 1583, the last edition Foxe had a hand in, the title to his preface no longer commends history at all but the broader and potentially more fictive category of a mere “story.”⁷ The 1570 edition is also, perhaps significantly, the last edition to be billed explicitly as an “ecclesiastical history.” As the book grew larger and larger, and included more and more detailed accounts of the martyrs of his own time, the Eusebian paradigm became increasingly difficult to sustain. So, too, did Foxe's sense that he was telling a single-threaded story, imitating Eusebius's claim, with regard to his own predecessors, that he was endeavoring to “give them unity by historical treatment.”⁸

The changes to the running headers of successive editions underline the fragmentation of the work as it expanded. The first edition bears a common running header, giving the title of the work, throughout. In the 1570 edition, arguably the closest to a Eusebian model, the “unity” of the story is forced by a split header on facing pages saying “Actes and Monuments / of the Church,” a general title sandwiched in the center between marginal titles specific to the episode being recounted, for instance the martyrdom of Polycarp or the antipapalism of the emperor Henry IV. This printer's device provides a sharp reminder on every page of that edition of the providential historical connection that roots each story into a nominally unified history. The device disappears halfway through the 1570 edition (and does not return in subsequent printings), at precisely the point at which Foxe's account is ceasing to become the tale of the church through its elite and their enemies and is instead growing populated by the common folk whose presence on the stage threatens to stretch the boundaries of the historical. From the margins, the individual story now moves into the center of the page, and the providential-historical connection is from this point on a subdued presence rather than a driving narrative engine.⁹

If Eusebius, and church history in general, proved to be useful but problematic paradigms, we are left with the difficulty of explaining how, despite his progressive expansion of the text, Foxe nonetheless managed to achieve a coherent historical vision and to synthesize his mass of details into an account that made sense as a whole. To what possible genres can he have turned, other than history? An obvious candidate, if only as a foil, is hagiography, and it is undeniable that there is much about the book that makes us think of medieval saints, not least of all because Foxe's own profound faith in his ability to serve as a witness to the lives of his martyrs mirrors the narrative attitude taken by most medieval hagiographers.¹⁰ Yet Foxe signals both his debt to and independence from the Catholic tradition of lives of saints in a dramatic way, in the “Kalender” of martyrs with which his book begins, a device that subverts as well as reinforces a hagiographic division of the year, imposing on it Protestant martyrs, listed month by month throughout the year in a way that profoundly irritated Catholic readers.¹¹ He also specifically attacks, in his Latin preface, such hagiographic texts as the Golden Legend for being utterly invented and unhistorical; and at various points in his account he denies the miracles attributed to popish saints reported by more reputable historians, such as Ranulf Higden, Bede, and Eadmer. At the same time, however, Foxe mimics this tradition by including his own answer to the miraculous: Protestant providences that, unlike the tales of hagiography, can be safely reported on the basis of credible testimony. On the death of Zwingli, for instance, he writes that “The report goeth, that after his body was cut first in foure peeces, and then consumed with fire, three daies after his death his friends came to see whether any part of him was remaining, where they found his heart in the ashes, whole and unburned: in much like manner as was also the heart of Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, which in the ashes also was found and taken up unconsumed, as by credible information is testified” (791.A.91-B.7).

If Foxe's heroes are indeed reformed countersaints, purified of false, romish miracles, they are also more than a mirror image. Although he idealizes character and dwells on the virtues of piety, Foxe was not content simply to imitate hagiographic models. The flesh-and-blood victims of his tales do not live the lives of holy hermits. Moreover, they also inhabit a historical space, a temporal process that ranges back and forth beyond their own lives but that mirrors the transcendent eschatological scheme implicit in all medieval church history and most hagiography. The importance of history and hagiography as formative genres behind Foxe's own project is thus indisputable, though the precise relationship between those genres and the book remains troubling. But there are strong signs in the structure and contents, and especially in the rhetorical disposition of the Book of Martyrs, that Foxe, a well-educated rhetorician and the author of plays, was influenced by other, less “serious” genres, even if he did not seek to imitate them. One of these, again a medieval genre, is romance, which itself has some features in common, and shares a parentage, with the saint's life; the second, which intrudes even more strongly in the latter half of the book, is comedy.¹²

On the face of it, romance should have been even less suitable to Foxe's purposes than was hagiography, which at least pertained to the sacred. It is quite likely that Foxe, in common with many Protestant writers of his age, distrusted romance as a genre, thinking it, as we know he thought Old Comedy, frivolous, even bawdy.¹³ He did, however, write two works for entertainment. The Oxford closet drama, Titus et Gesippus, which he penned in 1544-45, has unmistakable romance elements that can be traced to Foxe's sources, and in particular to Boccaccio; it is accurately described by its modern editor as a “romantic comedy.”¹⁴ A later play, Christus triumphans, composed in 1556 during Foxe's exile, allegorizes the Marian persecution and owes much less to romance; but it was termed by Foxe himself a comoedia apocalyptica, and both plays anticipate the comic themes that, I shall argue, would eventually intrude into the later books of the Acts and Monuments.¹⁵

Leaving aside his dramatic works, specific Renaissance exemplars of romance appear to have affected him little, and although the millennial subtext encourages a reading of the work as, instead, a kind of Christian epic, Foxe was certainly no Protestant Tasso or Ariosto. Yet even if Foxe has not imitated any specific formal genre, romance included, there are indisputably romance story elements in the design and structure of the Acts and Monuments, as there were in Titus et Gesippus. There is no central character, except the Church as a whole; nor is there an unilinear plot, beyond the providential supertext being written not by Foxe but by God. Instead, we find an interwoven narrative, consisting of a series of episodic accounts, spanning a millennium and a half, of the quest of true Christians for the One Church promised by God.¹⁶ Though often speaking of the historian's duty to maintain the order of time and place (a point to which we will return), Foxe repeatedly exercised a narrative freedom of movement that has more in common with romance than with classical historical models: shifting time and location, his story bounces from one part of Christendom to another. The multistoried architecture of the Acts and Monuments has something of the structure of a good soap opera, especially in its early sections, where Foxe toggles back and forth between English and European events, relying on connecting themes and tropes rather than a single unified plot to maintain a sense of order.

For in these diversities and alterations of times, I suppose the whole course of the church may well be comprised. The which church, because it is universall, and sparsedlie through all countries dilated, therefore in this historie standing upon such a generall argument, I shall not be bound to anie one certaine nation, more than another.

(1)

In a medieval romance, the telos generally involves the hero in some sort of divinely aided transcendence of the obstacles placed in his path by a hostile and often marvelous environment, his triumph over material temptation, and the success of his “quest.” Furthermore, romances at all times have nearly always focused not on the developing character of a single flawed protagonist, but on the static attributes of a variety of individuals in conflict. These are generally defined in stark terms that we would regard as naively black and white. The heroes of medieval and Renaissance romance alike are either perfect, like Galahad or Percival, or at the very least represent stable embodiments of virtues appropriate to their station: chastity, courtesy, nobility, generosity, and so on. Its villains, witches, giants, and monsters are unrepentantly and—unlike tragic dramatic villains such as Shakespeare's Richard III—unreflectively evil. The outward behavior of romance villains, indistinguishable from their inner qualities, if a function of the storyteller's need for a human agent to provide both a narrative obstacle for the heroes and a mirror for their pure acts. Romance writers such as Chrétien and the author of the Arthur cycle follow the adventures not of one character, even a superhumanly perfect being like Galahad, but of a variety of protagonists who, as Foxe said of his own martyrs, are “sparsedlie through all countries dilated.” Romance cuts back and forth between story lines, and from one character to another, though generally these are set against a common foe who takes many shapes and appears in several places; sometimes romance heroes may even find themselves fighting each other. As Sir Richard Southern noted in connection with Chrétien, “the enemy is dispersed; he is everywhere and may be found everywhere”; this almost exactly describes, as we will see, Foxe's sense of the struggle between individual Christian martyrs and the forces of Satan afoot in the world, a struggle that also, not infrequently, entails struggles within the ranks of the godly; this sort of struggle, and the allegorical mode of thought that constructs it, can be found in aspects of medieval historical writing but is much more obvious in a genre closer at hand, the Tudor interlude, for instance in King Johan, written by Foxe's friend and mentor John Bale.¹⁷

It would be foolish simply to replace the assertion that Foxe was a Protestant hagiographer with some other oversimplification, such as that he was a Protestant author of romance, or even that his principal model lay in romance rather than history: this would be to fall into the same formalist trap that, I am suggesting, we need to escape. What he did was much more complicated, bringing the narrative looseness of the romance story form to bear on what was a tremendous organizational challenge, without tying himself to the limitations or the subject matter of the romance genre. The story line of the Acts and Monuments is a romantic one, defined less by what happens than by where events lead, to the immediate reestablishment of Protestantism in Foxe's time and, beyond that, to an implied, but as yet unrealized, final triumph of the true Church at some undefined future time known only to the Almighty. The actual finale as much as the future telos are points to which the storyteller proceeds only slowly and indirectly, as a series of tales-within-the-tale are paratactically grafted onto each other. Unlike most figures of hagiography, Foxe's subjects live in the world and play by its rules. Although some priests and bishops figure prominently in the Book of Martyrs, and though its author was himself an ordained minister with a high regard for the role of a godly clergy, Foxe was writing for a predominantly lay audience. Consequently, the vast majority of Foxe's hundreds of characters are not clerics at all, but members of the laity, whether rulers such as the emperor Henry IV, godly Lollard knights such as Sir John Oldcastle, or, in the last and most famous third of the book, the pious artisans and illiterate laborers put to death by the Marian regime.

That Foxe should choose to borrow some of the conventions of romance in casting his vision of the past should not be surprising. To find a model for such an emplotment of Christian history, he needed to look not to Chrétien or even Malory, but no further than the genre, ecclesiastical history, that provided the bulk of his material on the late Roman and medieval church. The gap between romance and historiography has itself been overstated; as several medievalists have noted, medieval chronicles, both Latin and vernacular, ecclesiastical and aristocratic, have a great deal in common with the structure of romances, often amounting to romans à tiroir.¹⁸ Moreover, Walter Ong has argued forcefully that romance is the story form most highly suited to hierarchical societies in which literacy is confined to a small elite. Its episodic tales were highly suited to serial, interrupted oral performance, and the sharply polarized entities that inhabit most romances could most effectively strike the listener's senses and be retained in his or her memory. England in the later sixteenth century remained a hierarchical and marginally literate culture, albeit poised between an age of predominantly oral-scribal communication and the era of print, which was bringing with it an increase in popular literacy.¹⁹ The Acts and Monuments signifies its own place in this liminal social moment by beginning and ending with the importance of reading:

And while thou hast space, so employ thy selfe to reade, that by reading, thou maiest learne daily to know that may profit thy soule, may teach thee experience, may arme thee with patience, and instruct thee in all spiritituall knowledge more and more, to thy perpetuall comfort and salvation in Christ Jesu our Lord. …

(1949)

Print was the “science” given to man by God to stir up the reformation (768.A.36-49). Foxe knew as well as any that the overwhelming majority of the English population could not read, and print could help close the gap between the rude multitudes and the scripture by presenting God's Word in alternative ways. His book provided the channel between the oral tales of martyrdoms, which required recording and replication, at the same time digesting the enormous weight of church history into a popular form that could be read by the literate but also comprehended by the vulgar. It is a work thoroughly attuned to the requirements of those on the margins of literacy, both the text itself and its accompanying illustrations relying to a great degree, as does romance, on frequent repetition with variation.²⁰ The text and the various charts and tables were designed for those who have the skills to consult the printed word. The woodcuts translated and simplified this information into graphic images capable of perception by the ordinary parishioner, icons that in turn would reinforce the effect of hearing the tales read aloud from time to time; frequently these illustrations were even detached from the book, colored, and stuck on walls to provide godly decoration.²¹ This accounts, no doubt, for the number of copies of the 1583 edition that no longer have the pullout A table of the X. first persecutions of the primitive church printed by John Day in that year (and reprinted by Humfrey Lownes for the 1610 edition, from which it is often similarly missing), a chart that cross-references its images of martyrdom to the appropriate places in the text.²²

So far I have found in Foxe hints of both the hagiographer and the romancer, and have argued that the romance story form is the more useful in explaining how the Acts and Monuments ends up as more than a mere series of discontinuous lives laid end to end, how it tells a story the object of which is the eventual triumph of the saints. This picture is still only two-dimensional. It does not explain how Foxe dealt with the obverse of the problem of continuity: namely, how to invest his martyrs, his subjects, with a limited individuality without making them appear essentially different. To do so, he superimposed on his romance skeleton some comic flesh and blood, putting to good effect his own experience in writing his earlier Latin comediae.²³ He thereby made his martyrs and Reformers seem more human, less extraordinary, and more immediate to the reader; in short, he gave a work of epic proportions and high sacred purpose a rhetoric that is distinctly “low-mimetic,” grounding his own version of eschatological history in the dirt, flesh, and cloth of the experiential world.

Comparatively late in the narrative, when Foxe reached the age of the Lollards and the Tudor Reformers, he ran into a further complication: the backbone of the Reformed Church was neither the godly prince nor the reforming bishop, but the commoner. This would pose problems for any writer standing, however tentatively, on a scaffolding of romance, but to a devout Reformer and preacher who also laid claim to the title of historian, it created profound generic contradictions. The heroes of res gestae, like their fictitious romance counterparts, are by definition not ordinary but extraordinary. Romances, as Auerbach has taught us, are among the least “mimetic” of prose genres, partly because they are not populated by the fishermen, carpenters, bricklayers, and cooks we meet in every day life. Yet historical reality was such that these were indeed the types of individual whose lives and deaths Foxe had set himself to depict. In short, Foxe faced the problem of writing a Christian history with material of wide social heterogeneity: the very subjects he wished to memorialize fit ill with any of the traditional “high” genres.

This tension becomes apparent as the narrative approaches Foxe's own times, and it is nowhere clearer than in his treatment of the hundreds of victims of popish persecution in England from Wycliffe to the Marian regime. There are certainly a number of august figures of high seriousness and inherited social rank: Cranmer, he tells us, came from a long line of English gentry. But the purpose of the book and its several reeditions was never to extol the high and mighty; and despite its enormous influence, in this respect the Acts and Monuments lies at the margins rather than at the center of Tudor historiography, its concerns quite remote from those of most secular historical writing and biography as these genres were to develop under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.²⁴ Instead, Foxe's book sought to demonstrate, life by life, the courage, faith, and steadfastness of the ordinary English man and woman, down to the lowest of the low, so as to encourage those more fortunate ones who lived on into Elizabeth's time to imitate their godliness. The Acts and Monuments is not simply a recital of the great deeds of the past; it is an injunction to vigilance and godliness for the future, directed at the broadest possible spectrum of English churchgoers. This is precisely why the government insisted on its wide availability, chaining copies of the 1570 edition in cathedral churches by order of convocation, and why it enjoyed relatively steady and continuing sales at a time when most books of similar size and expense did not.

Foxe repeatedly emphasizes the humility and baseness of his martyrs; among other things, this allows him to contrast the earthly wealth and pomp of the Catholic Church with the apostolic simplicity of the saints. Furthermore, he tends to downplay the importance of the more famous martyrdoms: the deaths of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper receive more coverage than most—in part because the documentation surviving from their cases was naturally more plentiful—but they are by no means pivotal figures in the narrative, and their executions, for all the attention they have since received, do not mark any sort of climax to the work as a whole (though, as we will see further on, Cranmer is assigned a special status within the briefer range of the Marian substory). Even major continental Reformers such as Luther and Calvin do not merit exceptional treatment. Those of high station often come from humble origins. Foxe's account of the life and death of Thomas Cromwell—who figures only as one among many martyrs, rather than as a main actor in the drama of Henry VIII's Reformation—stresses the fact that Cromwell was a blacksmith's son, whose great successes derived principally from the divine education of his mind (1074). As might any biographer, Foxe stresses the small acts of hospitality and charity toward the godly that this Protestant saint performed throughout his life: for instance, Cromwell's provision of meat to a poor pregnant woman during Lent, or his kindnesses to Cranmer's godly secretary, Ralph Morice, who survived the persecutions to provide Foxe with the details of Cromwell's life (1080.B.40-1081.B40).²⁵ Like Cromwell, the zealous Reformer Hugh Latimer is no aristocrat but the son of a Leicestershire husbandman, and a devout papist till he was “pretily caught in the blessed net of Gods word”—a peculiar mixture of georgic and piscatorial-apostolic metaphors (1570.B.80). This praise of the low-born does not extend to all, and certainly not to the conservatives in the church. Wolsey, notorious even then as the son of an Ipswich butcher, becomes Foxe's perfect example of wealth and corruption. Foxe interjects a “brief discourse” on the cardinal “by way of digression,” in the midst of his account of early Henrician martyrs. Although, as Foxe admits, “it be not greatly pertinent unto this our history,” it proves an effective narrative tactic; coming as it does immediately after a lengthy series of poor martyrs, it underlines the disparity in earthly wealth and status between the saints and the leaders of the unreformed church (899ff.).²⁶

The most common sort of martyr is an ordinary person in town or country who shows little outward resistance to civil authority but is prepared to perish for the faith that God has graciously granted him or her. A typical group of saints, those martyred at Colchester in April 1556, includes two weavers, a tanner, a husbandman, a sawyer, and an apothecary. In most instances, execution is semivoluntary; it follows repeated attempts by the forces of popery to tempt the victim out of his beliefs and back into the safety of the Romish Church, like Satan's temptation of Christ in the wilderness. The London martyr Thomas Whittle merits more space than do the six others with whom he burns because of his initial recantation (1673ff.). His story serves as a preparative to the reader, a type foreshadowing the more famous tale of Cranmer's recantation, and of his ritualistic burning of the hand that signed it, an episode that brings the Marian section to its horrific climax, since Cranmer is the last of the learned martyrs, “and almost the verie middle man of all the martyrs which were burned in all her raigne besides.” Though far from representing everyman, Cranmer is at least a “middle” term amid one distinctive section in the longer historical process, a median rather than an average.²⁷ In cases such as his, the accused may obtain release, or be given some hope of the remission of punishment, before the pull of faith proves too great, forcing his relapse and rearrest. Being human, the condemned martyr may even experience a brief last-minute weakness, a personal Gethsemane, before Providence steps in and strengthens his resolve, allowing him to proceed not simply courageously, but happily, and sometimes even merrily, into the flames. This resolve is demonstrated over and over, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the case of the thirteen martyrs of Stratford-le-Bow, eleven men and two women, who go “joyfully” to the stake, kissing and embracing it. While the men are bound, the two women are “loose in the midst without any stake”; all are “burnt in one fire, with such love to each other, and constancy in our saviour Christ, that it made all the lookers-on to marvel” (1738).²⁸

As this last passage suggests, the comic side of the Book of Martyrs emerges both from Foxe's use of such stock narrative conventions as popular celebration and from his foregrounding of common folk.²⁹ The text is also genuinely entertaining, playful, and even funny, in many places. Foxe had a sense of humor, and he leavens his standard polemical tone with a dry wit. He even employs the occasional pun—his transition into a discussion of Edward Hall's Chronicle, one of his most important sources for Henry VIII's reign, is spoken of as a physical moving “out of the kitchen unto the hall,” for instance (532.A.41, emphasis added). Digression, too, is a rhetorical tactic that can use a humorous anecdote to make a point and at the same time lighten the reader's mood. An excellent example of this comes in Foxe's account of the panic over a nonexistent fire at Oxford in 1541 during the period of Henrician reaction following the enforcement of the antiheretical Six Articles.³⁰ On the face of it an unlikely candidate for humorous treatment, the grim business of the Henrician persecutions is rendered into entertainment, and humanized, through Foxe's skillful deployment of a “merrie and pleasant narration, touching a false fearfull imagination of fire, raised among the Doctors and Maisters of Oxford in S. Maries church at the recantation of M. Malary, M. of Art of Cambridge” (1102.A.8-1103.B.60). This tale is termed by Foxe himself “a tragicall storie of a terrible fire which did no hurt” (1103.B.49-50), yet which caused the deaths of several present, who were crushed to death in the panic. “Thus it pleased almighty God to delude these deluders, that is, that these great doctors and wise men of the schooles, which thinke themselves so wise in Gods matters as though they could not erre, should see by their owne senses and judgements, how blinde and infatuated they were in these so small matters and sensible trifles” (1102.A.80-86). There is a serious point, and the story is by no means irrelevant, but it performs the same sort of dramatic function as a barroom brawl or melée might in a modern war film, lightening the somber tone of the book. Foxe, who refers to this turmoil festively as a “pageant” (1102.B.92),³¹ is able to see some humor in the episode, suggesting (as so often with reference to his favored language of ruptured bodies) that had the ancient philosopher Democritus heard such a tale, he would have “laughed his heart out of his bellie” (1102.B.46).

A further comic touch comes in the occasional intrusion of the ironic, “providential joke,” whereby God avenges the deaths of his saints by inflicting on sinners and persecutors ends that mirror their own deeds. Thus Stephen Gardiner, the time-serving bishop of Winchester, is struck down after hearing of the burning of his fellow prelates Ridley and Latimer. Gardiner lies ill for fifteen days before dying,

his bodie being miserably inflamed within (who had inflamed so manie good martyrs before). … And thereof no doubt, as most like it is, came the thrusting out of his tongue from his mouth so swoln and black, with the inflammation of his body. A spectacle worthy to be noted and beholden of all such bloudy burning persecutors.

(1622.B.80-87)³²

The knight marshall of Calais, who refused to permit a martyr to bear witness to his faith before being hanged and quartered, meets a violent death in a skirmish with the French at Boulogne (1104.A.12). Others are eaten by lice, are struck down as they walk, or commit suicide. Their grim destinies (and the unspoken torments that lie beyond death) provide a grotesque countertext to the glorious ends of the godly. And a great deal of humor comes directly from the martyrs themselves, in their ability to jest with and often intellectually humiliate their persecutors, and in the manner of their deaths. The martyrs endure pain with a stoicism that goes beyond courage and dignity. In most cases they seem positively to enjoy the torment of the flesh and the spectacle of humiliation. We are told that Bishop Hooper, upon “having his neather parts burned, and his bowels fallen out,” died like a child in his bed (1373.A.64-65). The detachment of body parts and the mutilation of organs maintains its grisly appeal in entertainment media even today; in Foxe's time, it appears to have had an even more powerful allure for readers.

METAPHOR, UNITY, AND HISTORICAL TIME

Having now identified what may be seen as elements of romance and comedy in the Acts and Monuments, the first in its overall conception, shape, and story line, the second in its rhetorical treatment of place and character, it remains to ask what Foxe does with these mythoi; more specifically, how he handles certain narrative problems, foremost among which was to maintain the integrity and distinctness of individual martyrological identity, the existence of discrete subjects rather than hagiographic types, without subverting a central theme of the book as a whole: the essential unity and wholeness of the Church, and the spiritual sameness of its adherents through time and space. Unity, enforced by ecclesiastical discipline, was an important theme of Foxe's many theological writings. He was the earliest Reformed Englishman to author a tract on discipline, and he remained committed to the notion of a single national church, though he adapted his views in the 1560s to reflect the ecclesiology of the Elizabethan regime, and also to allow for his own greater sympathy for Anabaptists and other sectaries condemned as heretics by their fellow Protestants.³³

If there is a Burkean “master-trope” underpinning the Acts and Monuments, it is certainly metaphor, the figure of sameness. What strikes the reader most about the many successive accounts of persecutions, trials, and martyrdoms is how little they differ from one another: it is almost literally true that if you have read one martyr's death, you've read them all. Like most Reformers, Foxe subscribed to a cosmology that was Augustinian in its outlines, and the church father to whom his more learned martyrs appeal most frequently is none other than Saint Augustine himself. In this universe, there is only one undifferentiated essence, namely Go(o)d, against which is measured its own antithesis, (D)evil, which is simply a lack of good. “Good” is embodied on earth in Christ and his Church Triumphant, which is sometimes, though not always, coterminous with the Visible Church. The Church is no human institution, confined by the human dimensions of time and space; rather, it is a spiritual body (the oxymoron is intentional) which seeks, and finds, a multitude of physical manifestations that at bottom are essentially alike. As the martyr John Bradford explains, the true Church has existed “sithens the creation of men, and shall be for ever,” while the institutions that surround it provide mere outer clothing (1465).

The Church knows no natural boundaries. While much of his narrative concentrates on England, Foxe in no sense suggested that the English were an especially privileged “elect nation,” as William Haller once thought.³⁴ God respects neither time nor place: the first directive to the apostles is to go forth and spread the faith to the far corners of the world, but the popes and some misguided secular rulers of the eleventh century and after made a mockery of this by investing a specific place, Rome, with both sacred significance and preeminent authority. Even a series of well-intentioned acts such as the Crusades against Islam were foolish because they mistook a particular location, Jerusalem, for the real, spiritual Church, “as [if] it had been for the chiefe and onely force and strength of our faith” (391.A.76ff.) The Reformation was not, in Foxe's eyes, about the separation of a group of godly people from the corruption of humankind; it was rather a concerted effort to bring the unreformed segments of the Christian body back into conformity with Scripture. For all his loathing of Rome, Foxe never sought the outright destruction of Roman Catholicism; rather, he hoped for the sort of eirenic reform that might one day reduce all Christendom to the same godly obedience: the body of Christ's bride made whole, anew.³⁵

The real rebels in Foxe's stories are not the martyrs who guard the gospel, but the ecclesiastical and civil forces that over the course of centuries have divided Christendom, just as more recently they have severed, through mutilation, the physical bodies of the saints. If unity is the watchword of the Reformed, division is that of Rome. The apparent unity of the Catholics, like their argument that they can boast a continued descent from Christ, is specious. “Antichrist also hath his unitie, which is not to be kept,” Foxe asserts. “There is no unitie but where Christ knitteth the knot among such as be his” (1292.A.26, gloss-A.38). Discord is the devil's tool; his sowing of division among the godly during Edward VI's reign weakens the Reformation and allows the Catholic clergy to recover their strength. “Experience may teach us what discord worketh on publike weales; and contrary, what a necessarie thing concorde is to the advancement especially of Gods matters appertaining to his Church” (1292.A.51-54). Fearing that without their pastor they are likely to be divided, Rowland Taylor's flock at “Burntwood” bewail his execution with the cry, “What shall we poore scattered lambes doe?” (1387.A.6, emphasis added).

Even the central theological issue of the Eucharist is expressed as one of division versus unity. The differences between Catholics and Protestants on this issue are made clear in the confession of one martyr, John Denley (1529.A.1-15), while Foxe has Thomas Cranmer denounce the doctrine of transubstantiation on the grounds that it confuses the metaphorical relationship of blood and wine, body and bread with a literal one (1308-9). The preacher John Bland (under examination by Foxe's future critic Nicholas Harpsfield), pushes this point further, asserting that the popish Eucharist, in positing a false literal relationship in place of a true metaphorical one, actually “divides” the body from the flesh, “the one alive by the Godhead, the other livelie by Gods spirit, and both one sacrament” (1518.A.32-5). Similarly, when he is pressed to interpret Christ's “This is my body” remark, John Newman of Maidstone, a pewterer by occupation, replies that this is “a figurative speech, one thing spoken, & another meant, as Christ saith: I am a vine, I am a doore, I am a stone &c. Is he therefore a materiall stone, a vine or a doore?” (1770.A.10).

Foxe sustains this theme of unity through an extended play with a series of metaphors in which time, place, and circumstance are reduced to epiphenomena, accidents that matter little in the unfolding of history. The sole distinction that counts for anything is that between the binary opposites, good and evil, martyr and persecutor. Other distinctions of character, comportment, calling, and even social degree are all dissolved in the Church Triumphant, whither all true Christians seek to return.³⁶

One of the great errors of the degenerate Church of Rome, in Foxe's view, is that it was “so addict to outward shewes,” so fixated on the external details of religion, that it neglected the essence of the gospel. Ceremonies and laws count for little in Foxe's cosmos, where Christians are connected by common participation in blood: the spiritual blood of Christ shed for humanity, the symbolic blood drunk by the contrite sinner in communion, and the literal blood that the true believer sheds through his own immolation. The importance of blood as a unifying motif comes across early in the Acts and Monuments, where Foxe echoes Tertullian's statement that “the blood of Christians is seed,” which, spilled upon the ground, spreads and issues in the growth of the Church. “Such is the wisedome and providence of God,” writes Foxe, “that the blood of his deare saints (like good seed) never falleth in vaine to the ground, but it bringeth some encrease” (50.A.89). Throughout the text blood is the solvent that eradicates accidental differences and unites the holy, to one another and to Christ. The widow Margery Polley declares to the crowd assembled to witness her burning, “I am come to seale with my bloud Christs gospel, for because I know that it is true” (1527.A.75); William Tyms of Essex writes his final letter to his sister in his own blood (1723.A.25). On the other side, a thirst to shed blood is the mark of the persecutor. As Foxe comments in a gloss on the examination of John Bland, the reader must “Note how these Papists seeke for matter, to sucke the bloud of poore men” (1514.A.35, gloss). In perhaps the most grisly, and notorious, death of all, Foxe relates the burning of a Guernsey woman and her two daughters, one of whom, Perotine, is pregnant.³⁷ The accompanying woodcut shows three naked women at the stake, one of whom has a newborn infant bursting out through her womb. According to Foxe, the child was removed from the flames and then cast back in. “And so the infant baptised in his owne bloud, to fill up the number of Gods innocent saints, was both born and died a martyr, leaving behind it the world, which it never sawe, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian crueltie of this graceless generation of catholike tormentors” (1765.A24-29).³⁸ In this passage, first added in the 1570 edition (2129), Foxe goes beyond the flatter account of the affair published in 1563 (1544), playing upon the traditional link of blood with guilt, pronouncing the persecutors “bloudie guiltie homicides” whose crimes cannot be washed away. “Bloud, especiallie of Christs servants, is a perilous matter,” Foxe declares further on, a matter which “will not be stilled with the lawes of men” (1915.B.61-64). No human law, from whatever authority it issues, can justify such bloodletting or deny God his vengeance on the tormentor.

Just as “blood” is necessary to wash the Church clean and unite its members, so is “fire,” its elementary counterpart, the truest measure of spiritual strength.³⁹ Again, the fire is both literal and metaphorical: the Lollard William Sawtrey (d. 1401), a clerk degraded into a layman, is “inflamed with zeale of true religion” long before he is literally burned (474.A.56-476.B.70), as is the Henrician Thomas Bilney (910). In one synthesis of the fire image with the comic theme of martyrdom as marriage, Foxe describes how the Lollard John Badby, one of the first artificers executed under Henry IV, “consummate[d] his testimony and martyrdome in fire” (481.A.59-60; emphasis added); in another, the Petrine figure of the fisherman Rawlins White is burned at Cardiff in his wedding garment (1415.B.37); white in name, he is also clad in white. Fire not only purges but also provides illumination: the body of an Ipswich preacher, Robert Samuel, becomes a torch illuminating the gospel. “The report goeth among some that were there present, and saw him burne, that his body in burning did shine as bright and white as new tried silver in the eies of them that stoode by: as I am informed by some which were there, and did behold the sight” (1547.B51-55).

As with any narrative held together by metaphor, much is made of related stylistic devices such as analogy and allegory, itself the dominant trope of romance.⁴⁰ As Bishop Latimer observes in a sermon quoted extensively in the Acts and Monuments, all human discourse relies on such resemblances, and “everie speech … hath his metaphors and the like figurative significations, so common and vulgar to all men, that the very painters doe painte them on walles and on houses” (1574.B.36-39). Foxe felt perfectly free to make comparisons, suggest resemblances and highlight similarities, and figure type and antitype, often across vast expanses of time. The vocabularies of good and evil change remarkably little in the course of the work, and they frequently challenge the reader or hearer to become involved in the game of finding similitudes. As I have contended in this chapter, Foxe's stories were so powerful, and so influential, because his choice of language appealed to the thought processes of his Elizabethan audience, processes that revolved around networks of correspondence, resemblance, and likeness. A common phrase for persecutors such as “devouring and ravening wolves” (140.A.16) can be understood on two levels, as depicting the literal wolves, which the Anglo-Saxon King Edgar is supposed to have expelled from England, and also the bloodthirsty wolves of Rome; to an even more sophisticated reader, the wolf has an emblematic significance, as an icon of gluttony, the quintessential monkish vice. Sometimes, readers are left to draw these analogies for themselves; at others, the martyrologist provides a helping hand. In one such case, Foxe likens the “curse” of a medieval pope to the “thunder” of an earlier persecutor, the emperor Domitian. “The pope's curse may well bee assimilated to Domitians thunder: if a man give eare to the noise and cracke, it seemeth a terrible thing; but if you consider the causes thereof, it is a most vaine ridicule” (152.A.88-B.1). Individual martyrs and martyrdoms mirror each other, while each in turn is an image of Christ and his Crucifixion. When the Henrician martyr Thomas Man is burned, after twice recanting and relapsing, he is delivered by the chancellor of the diocese of London to the sheriff because the Church “had no power to put him to death” (742), precisely the same reason the Pharisees used in turning Christ over to Pilate.⁴¹ Regimes that harry the godly “stumble at the same stone as did the Jewes in persecuting Christ” (1902.B.28).

It might be argued that a historian preoccupied with sameness and resemblance has an easy task, since any event or character can be seen as the type or antitype of any other. But such sameness is a matter of inner character, not of external characteristics, and in order to demonstrate it, Foxe was paradoxically obliged to pay close attention to the small differences, to the details, if only to show how little they mattered. Thus we have not one archetypical burning, nor even a few, but dozens upon dozens, each one described in intimate detail which often includes pictorial descriptions of the room in which an examination took place or the clothing worn by the martyr, right down to Bishop Latimer's “old felt” hat (1603.A.40): we are back, again, to Foxe's low-mimetic scenography. For modern readers, the effect is to make this collection of lives more biographically convincing, but Foxe appears to have had rather the opposite purpose in mind. By localizing his characters in time and space, and by bringing out their differences in circumstance, education, social degree, and occupation, Foxe was able to demonstrate to the reader that these were mere accidents, external features that conceal inner similarities. In the case of Latimer, his outward poverty and frailty can be contrasted with his fellow sufferer Ridley, in a sort of Plutarchan parallel description that converges at the stake:

Master Ridley had a faire blacke gowne furred, and faced with foines, such as he was wont to weare beeing bishop, and a tippet of velvet furred likewise about his neck, a velvet night cap upon his head, and a corner cap upon the same, going in a paire of slippers to the stake, and going between the Maior and an Alderman, &c.

After him came Master Latimer in a poor Bristow freeze frock all worne, with his buttoned cap, and a kerchiefe on his head, all readie to the fire, a newe long shrowde hanging over his hose downe to the feet: which at the first sight, stirred mens hearts to rue upon them, beholding on the one side, the honour they sometime had, on the other, the calamitie whereunto they were fallen.

(1065.A.25-28)

The suppression of difference applies to more than physically and temporally linked pairs like these two bishops. It also cuts across the ages. No matter how much each individual martyr may have lived a life of his or her own, all these differences are resolved in the process of persecution, which structurally varies little from Christ to Cranmer—plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The persecution for treason of the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle can thus be made to stand for all persecutions everywhere and at all times:

He that is or shall bee acquainted with old histories and with the usuall practises of Satan the old enemie of Christ, from the first beginning of the primitive Church unto this present time, shall see this to bee no newes, but a common and (as ye would say) a quotidian fever among Christs children. …

(525.B.83-88)

Foxe includes the text of the condemnation of John Rogers, the first Marian victim and, despite his clerical status, in several ways a prototype, because this document could “serve for all other sentences condemnating through the whole story to be referred to” (1352). Almost every episode is driven by the simple triadic relation of Persecutor-Martyr-Cause, whereby an initial deed (the “cause”) on the part of the martyr-to-be, often some sign of Reformed religiosity such as reading from the Bible, serves as a spur to the persecutor in bringing an action. Foxe highlights this relationship, the motive machinery of his stories, in a number of places, for instance in the caption accompanying the representation of a martyr's beheading.

The celebrated woodcuts further support Foxe's simplification of narrative action and his suppression of historical difference. There is no evidence that Foxe himself directed the cutting of these illustrations, but both the textual cross-references and the banderoles, presenting words that Foxe attributes to particular martyrs, suggest his close collaboration with the publisher, John Day, in their design. A number of these woodcuts were made, as John N. King points out, specifically for Foxe's book by illustrators in Day's employ, and several are known to represent realistic likenesses of their subjects—Bishop Bonner is supposed to have complained that his was too accurate. On the other hand, a great many of the woodcuts, particularly where the humbler martyrs are concerned, are stereotypes rather than likenesses, and in several cases the same woodcut was used (a common Renaissance cost-saving measure not confined to Day) to depict different people or scenes: Robert Samuel of Suffolk is one of a number of martyrs so represented.⁴² A strikingly inapposite illustration adjoins Foxe's account of the burning of Julius Palmer, a youthful fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. The text tells us that he suffered together with two other men at Newberry; the uncaptioned woodcut shows only Palmer and other being burned, and both of these figures appear considerably older than the description of Palmer suggests (1761.A).⁴³ Other discrepancies between text and image are commonplace, and not all are accidental. Foxe's account (940) of Robert Debnam, Robert King, and Nicholas Marshe, the three iconoclasts hanged in 1532 for destroying the Rood of Dovercourt, states the historical, documented fact that they were executed in three different places; yet the accompanying woodcut shows all three hanging together off adjoining gallows, before a crowd of gloating churchmen and onlooking soldiers. The Christian connection to be drawn from this analogy is hammered home with the image of the rood itself, surrounded by flames, superimposed at the bottom left corner: crime and punishment are compressed into a single, powerful image.⁴⁴

Frances A. Yates has suggested that Foxe envisaged the Marian burnings as modern reenactments of the primitive persecutions and that he represented the Tudor royal reformers Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I as sixteenth-century Constantines, realigning the church with godly secular power.⁴⁵ It is analogy of this kind, and the metaphoric world view that underlies it, that allows Foxe to maintain but de-center time and place, the twin axes of history, by asserting the essential sameness of all martyrs and, by extension, of all times. He sets out this device early on, in the preface Ad Doctum Lectorem (significantly, the only section of the book to be written in socially exclusive Latin), explicitly pairing new martyrs with old saints, Thomas Cranmer with Thomas Becket, Nicholas Ridley with St. Nicholas. This sort of free comparison continues throughout his account as the most humble are tied to the mighty, and figures of recent times to those of more remote. The “good” duke of Somerset similarly becomes an image of the “good” duke Humfrey of Gloucester a century earlier (1248). William Tyndale, “the apostle of England,” is depicted in a woodcut going to his death clad only in a loincloth, a graphic as well as a textual imitatio Christi (981, 985). Bishop Hooper is compared to Polycarp “as they both were joined together in one spirit” (1373), while Laurence Saunders or Sanders is likened to St. Laurence:

And thus have yee the full historie of Laurence Sanders, whom I may well compare to S. Laurence, or any other of the olde martyrs of Christs Church: both for the fervent zeale of the trueth and gospell of Christ, and the most constant patience in his suffering: as also for the cruell torments that hee in his patient body did susteine in the flame of fire.

(1362.A.16-21, emphasis added)⁴⁶

Virtually any comparison became valid in Foxe's eyes because the martyrs were all essentially the same. The false accusation of heresy against an early sixteenth-century bricklayer is freely compared with various other examples of wrongful persecution, including those of Socrates, Aristides the Just, St. Paul, and a number of church fathers (1146.A.80-86). Underlying all these explicit analogies is a single implicit archetype, the accusation and trial of Christ himself.

Foxe's commitment to a representation of the church as an undifferentiated whole created problems of chronology. Though it follows the story of the church in order, from earliest to most recent times, the Acts and Monuments frequently digresses and meanders from time to time and place to place. Like any other Renaissance historian, Foxe recognized that his story was at best a rhetorical representation of past reality, not that reality itself; and he acknowledged that things took place in the order in which they did because it was God's will that they do so. But though the historian should emulate temporal reality as closely as possible, it was also his duty to make higher connections for the reader—if necessary, through ungainly digression. Conscious that some—especially the Catholic critics of early editions of the book—had found fault with this, Foxe defended himself by asking, “why should I be restrained from the free walke of a story writer, more then other that have gone before me?” (645.B.4-5).

This was not an avowal of narrative anarchism, nor a proto-Derridean elevation of the process of writing over its end product, the text; rather, it was a recognition that all authors, up to and including himself (and since), find that their pens often take them in unforeseen directions, across subjects unanticipated in all their preliminary planning and outlining. Foxe promised at the outset of his book to “proceed in the course of our storie, as the spirit of God shall vouchsafe to direct us,” in the manner of a gospeler recording external events under divine inspiration. He was well aware of the rhetorical demands that a biographer, as much as a historian, relate events in the order that they occurred. In concluding an account of the life of Origen, which Foxe had in fact taken almost verbatim from the Magdeburg Centuries, he declares that “the congrue order of historie requireth next to speake of Heraclas his usher”; he thereupon relates a story that is closely connected to Origen's by proximity both in time and place. But keeping faith with the chronological outlines of history (something he needed to do in an effort to fend off Catholic critics who challenged his veracity) often conflicted with Foxe's conviction that he had to be as comprehensive as possible, and he persistently violated the order of story both to make his free comparisons of characters and to ensure that high or low, modern or ancient, almost no one was left out. He saw himself as the personal guarantor of everlasting earthly fame to those who had given over their lives to the faith, and the strict principles of life-writing could be bent or broken accordingly. An account of Persian martyrs—not among the best known of ancient Christians—is sufficiently necessary that Foxe feels compelled to “stray somewhat out of the order and course of time and place” (89-90). On some occasions, information came to hand after the relevant section of the Acts and Monuments had been composed. He inserts a speech of King Edgar between his accounts of Harold II's and William the Conqueror's reigns “although out of order” because “better I judge it out of order, then out of the booke” (153.A.5). Much further on, he appends an account of several previously overlooked Henrician martyrs, well out of their proper place: “Yet rather then they should utterly be omitted, I thoght here to give them a place, though somewhat out of time … being no lesse worthy to be registered and preserved from oblivion, then other of their fellowes before them” (1162.A 69ff.). Having recounted the burning of Robert Glover, Foxe briefly mentions the excommunication of his two brothers, John and William, who survived unscathed. “I thought them not unworthie therfore in the storie to be joyned together, which in one cause and the same profession were not sundred one from the other” (1556.B.11-14); the storyteller can use his discretion to reunite in narrative those who were together in life.⁴⁷

Foxe's devotion to the reputation of the single martyr meant that even the nameless and illiterate counted. The first piece of oral evidence to be used in the volume concerns the burning of “a certaine godly woman” under Henry VII; this was a martyrdom concerning which virtually no written information survived, but it had been witnessed by one Rowland Webbe, whose son Richard had in turn informed Foxe (708.A.58-711.B.71). Anonymous martyrs such as this deserved as much attention as their more famous brethren; if anything, they merited special praise from Foxe, both because they had been denied earthly fame by the very obliteration of their names and because they provided specimens representative of the whole army of saints. These were the “unknown soldiers” of Foxe's world war against antichrist. The poor and illiterate similarly cried out for their place on the printed page. When the Reformer John Bradford, after refusing several opportunities to recant, is finally consigned to the flames, he meets death in the company of a young chandler's apprentice named John Leafe who apparently cannot read for himself: even his own confession has to be read aloud to him in prison. A Wiltshire farmer, John Maundrell, is described as illiterate, “but when he came into any companie that could read, his booke was alwaies readie, having a very good memory,” and he could recite most places in the New Testament (1719.A.35-40).

CONCLUSION

While at a superficial level the Acts and Monuments can be viewed merely as Protestant hagiography, and as a Reformed version of Foxe's main sources for the early church, Eusebius and Bede, it should be evident, I hope, that the work is much more complex in both narrative structure and rhetorical form than it has previously been deemed. Without denying the book's obvious resemblance to the various medieval Christian genres on which it draws—romance, ecclesiastical history, and hagiography—I have suggested that these collectively represent only one side of its genealogy and that it is in many ways a hybrid that cannot be well understood within the terms of formal genre criticism. If the content of the work is inspired by religious narratives of the past, then the manner in which that content is presented owes much to the tensions between these genres, tensions only partly resolved in the rhetoric of Foxe's lives. The narrative strategies that he employed spring in part from the conflict between his various duties as martyrologist, historian, and biographer, in part from his sensitivity to the reading practices and intellectual assumptions of his audience.

The Acts and Monuments was perhaps the most widely read book in Reformation England, apart from the Bible, to which it was often seen as a supplement, an uncanonical “Book of Martyrs” to follow the books of prophets and chronicles in the Old Testament and the apocryphal Book of Maccabees. It is correctly regarded as being one of a kind, at least within England. But having now traced some of the many streams that flow into it, is it now possible to explore the ways in which those streams proceed out again, into other genres of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century prose and even poetry? It has long been acknowledged that such Elizabethan masterworks as the Faerie Queene that, more obviously than Foxe, have the generic structure of romance, also have strong religious and even apocalyptic themes.⁴⁸ It is not stretching the connection to see the Acts and Monuments as a missing link connecting a discredited genre like romance with the purified Protestant poetics of Spenser, and beyond him of Milton and Bunyan. Rather than limit ourselves to a study of either Elizabethan “fiction” or “fact,” history or poetry, we should explore the rhetorical homologies between works such as Foxe's and Spenser's. Similarly, it might be worth considering the possibility that the later literature of roguery and crime, which features a gallows humor not unlike that shown by many of Foxe's martyrs—and which in turn ultimately found its place in the early novel—owes its parentage at least in part to the Book of Martyrs: a work with a serious message, but one its author well knew had to entertain its readers as it instructed them.

Notes

1. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: H. Lownes for Company of Stationers, 1610), 1872. For bibliographical details, reference may be made to the entries on Foxe in the second, revised edition of A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 3 vols., ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. F. Pantzer (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-92), hereafter referred to as STC. Foxe's book appeared in several editions, and it will be necessary to refer to several of these. As my base edition I have taken the sixth (London: H. Lownes for Company of Stationers, 1610, STC 11227), which appeared in two volumes under the title Actes and Monuments of Matters most Speciall and Memorable, Happenyng in the Church, with an Universall History of the Same; the second volume of this is entitled The Second Volume of the Ecclesiasticall Historie, a distinction I shall discuss below. Most references in this chapter will be to that edition and will be given in the text, generally with page number, column letter (a or b for left and right) and, where relevant, line numbers. For illustrative woodcuts, however, I have for convenience used the two-volume edition published by John Day in 1583 (STC 11225, the last edition published in Foxe's lifetime), which appeared under the same title, a copy of which is in the library of the University of King's College, Halifax, to whom I am grateful for permission to reproduce material; page references to the woodcuts will therefore be to the 1583 edition. There will be occasion to refer to the earlier editions, which appeared under the following titles: Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church (London: J. Day, 1563, STC 11222); The First Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History contayning the Actes and Monumentes of Thynges Passed in Every Kynges Tyme in this Realme (London: J. Day[e], 1570, STC 11223) [the second volume is similarly titled, but in this edition the two volumes are, for the first and only time, separately paginated]; Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church (London: J. Day[e], 1576, STC 11224); Actes and Monuments of Matters most Speciall and Memorable, Happening in the Church, with an Universall history of the Same (London: P. Short, 1596, STC 11226). The frequent changes in title are an obvious, and hitherto neglected, sign of an instability of genre and of an ambivalence in the mind of author and, no doubt, publisher, as to how exactly to present such a complex and unusual book.

2. The authoritative biography of Foxe, now in need of revision but mainly reliable, remains J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (London: SPCK, 1940); see pp. 234ff. for a list of editions of Foxe's works. More recently, see the short but useful biographical-textual study, W. W. Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne, 1983). For an account of Foxe firmly within the context of the hagiographic tradition and its Protestant debunking (a contextualization I am disputing here), see Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 132-95. White recognizes (169) that Foxe did not intend to write a Protestant sequel to the Golden Legend, but she nevertheless stresses the hagiographic aspects of his character delineation. Like Wooden and White, Catharine Randall challenges the continuity between the genres of medieval hagiography and Protestant martyrology while maintaining a view of Foxe as standing “at the intermediate position between the two poles of hagiography and martyrology”: see her (Catharine Randall Coats), (Em)bodying the Word: Textual Resurrections in the Martyrological Narratives of Foxe, Crespin, de Bèze and d'Aubigné (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 38; see also her chapter in the present volume. My own essay owes a considerable debt to Timothy Hampton's book, Writing from History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); see especially pp. 122-33 for an illuminating study of the “poetics of martyrdom.” I have also profited from Michael McKeon's illuminating explorations of the growth of a sense of emplotment, together with historical consciousness, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), though its main concern is the seventeenth century. Finally, John R. Knott's Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), is the first serious attempt to study Foxe as part of a continuing tradition of persecution literature up to the later seventeenth century.

3. Stefan J. Smart, “John Foxe and ‘The Story of Richard Hunne, Martyr,’” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 1-14, at p. 14.

4. John G. Rechtien, “John Foxe's Comprehensive Collection of Commonplaces: A Renaissance Memory System for Students and Theologians,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978): 83-89, for Foxe's rhetorical training.

5. I am here “imitating,” in what he would no doubt regard as a transformative way, the taxonomy of imitation worked out by G. W. Pigman III in his incisive essay, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1-32; Pigman's comments refer principally to versions of imitation involving the transportation of phrases, sentences, or passages from one work into another, rather than the wholesale mixing of genres that I shall here be arguing occurs in Foxe; or perhaps Foxe's application of techniques worked out in romance, comedy, hagiography, and chronicle to the history of the church deserves the term emulation, the hallmark of which, for Pigman, is “an awareness of the historical distance between present and past,” a feature that I do not believe, for reasons that will become clear further on, distinguishes Foxe's sense of the unfolding of history.

6. A number of Tudor historical texts, such as the Acts and Monuments, seem ripe for a reappraisal in the wake of recent literary theory. In her essay, “Rethinking Tudor Historiography,” South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1993), 185-208, Annabel Patterson has made such a plea on behalf of a book that has until now been taken even less seriously in literary and historiographical terms, Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 1577 and revised and enlarged by several contributors in 1587; her book Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) should redirect historiographical attention from the much-studied humanist historians toward the generally maligned sixteenth-century chroniclers who, unlike Foxe, have until now had few champions.

7. The original 1563 preface is billed as “A declaration concerning the utilitie and profite of thys history.” This point should not be overstated, because the terms story and history were nearly interchangeable in the sixteenth century, but the shifts in usage suggest, once again, some uncertainty about exactly how to bill the work.

8. Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols., trans. Kirsopp Lake (London and Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 1949), I.1.2-5.

9. The last occurrence of the split header is at vol. I, p. 647 of the 1570 edition; it is not employed in volume II.

10. As D. Karl Uitti points out in his study of French romance, “participation in the telling of a saint's life was itself an act of faith, an act of witness”: Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050-1200 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 26.

11. The Kalender appears in the 1563 edition, complete with an almanac for the seasons, but was removed in the 1570 edition, that which cathedral churches were required to possess. Absent again in 1576, it returned in the 1583, 1596, and 1610 editions, in all cases without the almanac. The Kalender was specifically attacked by at least one Catholic polemicist, Robert Persons, or Parsons, in A treatise of three conversions of England from paganisme to Christian religion, 3 vols., (St. Omer: François Bellet, 1603-4), who made a month-by-month critique of it the principal subject of the third part (volumes II and III) of his work.

12. Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 3, 111.

13. For example, in the enormously influential catechism by the puritan Edward Dering, A Short catechisme for householders (London: J. Charlewood, 1580 and various other editions). Once again, compare the attitude of a Counter-Reformation poet such as Tasso, concerned with reconciling ideological (religious) seriousness with romance, as described by Hampton, Writing from History, 121. Foxe repudiates “the several types of vices and the grosser shames of the mob” that he associates with Old Comedy in the dedicatory epistle to Christus Triumphans, published at Basel in 1556 and translated by Richard Day as Christ Jesus Triumphant (London: J. and R. Day, 1598) and republished in Two Latin Comedies: “Titus and Gesippus” and Christus Triumphans, trans. and ed. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press for the Renaissance Society of America, 1973), 209.

14. Smith, “Introduction,” to Foxe, Two Latin Comedies, 9. Cf. Judith H. Anderson, “Biographical Truth,” in Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), chap. 1; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936); David Quint, “Renaissance Epic and the Boat of Romance,” in Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, eds., Romance: Generic Transformations from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 178-202.

15. John N. King, “John Foxe,” Sixteenth-Century British Non-Dramatic Writers, First series, ed. David A. Richardson, Dictionary of Literary Biography 132 (New York: Gale Publishing, 1993), 131-40. Smith, “Introduction,” in Foxe, Two Latin Comedies: “Titus and Gesippus” and Christus Triumphans, trans. and ed. John Hazel Smith (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press for the Renaissance Society of America, 1973), 9, points to Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Gouernour (London: T. Berthelet, 1531), and beyond that to Boccaccio's Decameron, as respectively the direct and ultimate sources of Titus et Gesippus; cf. John H. Smith, “Sempronia, John Lyly, and John Foxe's Comedy of Titus and Gesippus,” Philological Quarterly 48 (1969): 554-61, in which Foxe's early experience as a playwright is used to account for the dramatic setup of much of his book, for instance, the examination of John Newman the pewterer (1610 edn., 1769-70). I would disagree, however, with Smith's conclusion, on largely negative evidence, that Foxe was unfamiliar with Boccaccio directly; I would similarly contest his suggestion, meant to contrast the dramas with the Acts and Monuments, that the Book of Martyrs “can be called comic only in some specialized sense, if at all” (Smith, “Introduction,” 10).

16. A brief foray into the realm of rhetorical theory may be helpful here. In the late Northrop Frye's famous formulation, modified and applied to nineteenth-century historiography by Hayden White some twenty years ago, one can look beyond formal genre to recognize four basic story types or mythoi: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire: Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 131-239; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). One must therefore consider not only whether an author has formally chosen to imitate a particular genre, but whether he or she has actually borrowed from that genre a particular narrative mythos (or, for that matter, any other narrative or stylistic element from character depiction to tropes and images) in an effort to construct a narrative that may itself defy any such generic categorization—that may, indeed, be literally sui generis. Plainly, there are some mythoi that do not in the least fit Foxe's book: there is little about the Acts and Monuments that might be called satirical, for instance. There are undoubtedly some wickedly sarcastic passages which hold the medieval clergy and the backsliding Tudor episcopacy up to ridicule, but the tone of these is earnest, not ironic. If anything, the work is positively naive and unreflective in its chiding, homiletic voice. Nor, in the strict sense, can the Book of Martyrs be seen as a tragedy: it has no single well-defined plot line; complexities of character are not crucial to the development of its narrative; and there is no climactic event involving the fall of a flawed hero.

17. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953; reprint, London: Hutchinson, 1967), 233.

18. Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 200-202. Partner also notes, following Auerbach and William W. Ryding, a paratactical writing strategy in the chroniclers. On the medieval aristocratic chroniclers, for whom the generic connections with romance proper were even more compelling, see William Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). For a thorough study of the relations between romance and vernacular historiography, that unfortunately appeared too late to be taken fully into account in this chapter, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).

19. Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus, Rhetoric and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); idem, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 3, 35, 75; idem, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1971), esp. chap. 2, “Oral Residue in Tudor Prose Style,” and chap. 6, “Ramist Classroom Procedure and the Nature of Reality”; idem, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982). Romance structures occur in a socially heterogeneous variety of works ranging from Spenser's Faerie Queene—which straddles the border between romance and epic—and the numerous popular ballads and broadsheets of a highly formulaic nature, such as Guy of Warwick. There are obvious parallels between Elizabethan England and twelfth-century society—on a more limited scale—as described by Vinaver, Rise of Romance, 4, who refers to the birth of romance as “the birth of a world in which vernacular writings were to share with Latin texts the privilege of addressing the reader through the medium of visible, not audible, symbols.”

20. Vinaver, Rise of Romance, 7.

21. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 117; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 178-216. We know that Foxe himself enjoyed drawing and may have been responsible for the picture of Bonner caning Protestants in his orchard at Fulham: Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 131. On the printing of various editions of Foxe, see, in addition to the works already cited, Paul S. Dunkin, “Foxe's Actes and Monuments, 1570, and Single-Page Imposition,” The Library, 5th series, 2 (1947): 159-70; Leslie M. Oliver, “The Seventh Edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (1943), 243-60, which is especially good on sizes of edition and on the distribution of the 1570 edition according to the order in Convocation.

22. This table appears also to have been sold separately and was reprinted in 1625 and 1632; see the descriptions in STC 2, 496, nos. 11227 to 11228.3. Thomas S. Freeman of Rutgers University, who is completing a dissertation on Foxe, informs me that the Huntington Library copy of the 1583 edition of the Acts and Monuments has a dated copy of the table, printed by Day, in contrast to the assertion in STC that the table appeared first only in 1610.

23. Foxe had deliberately added comic elements to the story of Titus and Gesippus in his 1545 drama: Smith, “Introduction,” 24.

24. On which see the following works: F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967); Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979); D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology and the “Light of Truth” from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).

25. Hospitality is another convention commonly to be found in medieval romance and is one of the motifs that connects its heroes with their counterparts in hagiography: Matilda T. Bruckner, Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980).

26. Here, as elsewhere in describing the Henrician Reformation, Foxe leans heavily on Edward Hall's chronicle: but whereas for Hall the base origins of Wolsey flaw him inherently, in Foxe's version they are only a weakness insofar as Wolsey's pretensions and high life are strategies to cloak them.

27. This “climax” does not figure in Foxe's design of his narrative, which did not, in any case, require crises or turning points; the “middle man” thus comes not halfway but nine-tenths of the way through the pages devoted to Mary's reign, and very close to the end of the whole work.

28. On Foxe's female martyrs, see E. Macek, “The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in The Book of Martyrs,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 63-81; Carole Levin, “Women in The Book of Martyrs as Models of Behaviour in Tudor England,” International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1981): 196-207.

29. The student who commented to me, some years ago, after her class had been shown a series of woodcuts from the Book of Martyrs, that the burnings were “kind of like our church barbecue” was not merely, as I only later realized, making a humorous remark of questionable taste, but also commenting incisively on the almost festive atmosphere surrounding the illustrations of many of the executions, which contrast sharply in this regard with the dark solemnity in contemporary illustrations of continental autos-da-fé.

30. I thank Martha Yeide for drawing this to my attention.

31. Cf. Foxe's account of a related incident at 1103.A.74.

32. Similar fates befall Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, persecutors both: “they that staine their hands with bloud, seldome doe bring their bodies drie to the grave” (975.B.80). The “horrible deaths of persecutors” theme derives ultimately from Lactantius, Of the Manner in which the Persecutors Died, in The Works of Lactantius, 2 vols., trans. William Fletcher (Edinburgh: Anti-Nicene Christian Library, vol. XXII, 1871), 164-211. Foxe also explicitly emulates Lactantius's claim, in chapter 52, that “I relate all those things on the authority of well-informed persons; and I thought it proper to commit them to writing exactly as they happened, lest the memory of events so important should perish …” (211). Lactantius tells us how “by the unerring and just judgement of God, all the impious received according to the deeds that they had done” (chap. 50, p. 210). Foxe summarizes the “terrible end of persecutors” at the very conclusion of the 1583 and 1610 editions (1610, pp. 1902-1916).

33. Foxe, De censura, sive excommunicatione ecclesiastica rectoque eius usu (London: S. Mierdmann, 1551), discussed by Catherine Davies and Jane Facey, “A Reformation Dilemma: John Foxe and the Problem of Discipline,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39 (1988): 37-65. In Foxe's “Sermon of Christ Crucified,” preached in 1570 and cited by Davies and Facey (57), he prayed for the “universal state of Christ's Church, and all other estates and degrees.”

34. William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963); for a critique of this interpretation of Foxe, see K. R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

35. V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 108-22; John T. McNeill, “John Foxe: Historiographer, Disciplinarian, Tolerationist,” Church History 43 (1974): 216-29.

36. Foxe subscribed so fervently to this Pauline-Augustinian view of the world as a set of binary opposites that he even included two separate prefaces in the 1563 edition of the work, one to “the persecutors of God's truth, commonly called papists,” and another to “the true and faithful congregation of Christ's universal Church.”

37. This is the infamous story which the Catholic polemicist Thomas Harding had attacked in earlier editions of Acts and Monuments as a fabrication; Foxe defends it, and other seemingly incredible tales, by referring the reader to the testimony of witnesses still living. The image of the baby cast into the fire in front of its mother was a common one in Reformation and Counter-Reformation propaganda, which would resurface during the Thirty Years' War. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 223-35, demonstrates that although Foxe may have embellished the tale in many regards, he did not invent it, since records of the women's condemnation are extant. Foxe's earliest critics (first Harding, then Robert Persons) had attacked the martyr status of the women, suggesting that they were in fact accomplices to the theft of a silver cup stolen by one Vincent Gosset, and that Perotine in particular was a prostitute, because her husband is not explicitly mentioned.

38. The choice of “Herodian” as an adjective suggests, again, an appeal to audience familiarity with medieval drama, Herod having been a stock figure of mystery plays. For evidence of the influence of the mysteries on an earlier English humanist historian, see Retha M. Warnicke, “More's Richard III and the Mystery Plays,” Historical Journal 35 (1992): 761-78.

39. The two images are linked. Both are traditional symbols of heat and are tied together in the theory of humors, with which Foxe and his better-educated readers were entirely familiar: a sanguine person is one of warm disposition who is courageous and hopeful, the very qualities that Foxe highlights in his martyrs.

40. For the place of analogy in romance, see Vinaver, Rise of Romance, 99-122.

41. Foxe describes Christ being handed over to the secular power of Pontius Pilate, after interrogation by priests, in similar terms (40ff.).

42. For two excellent recent treatments, from different perspectives, of the use of woodcuts in Foxe and other Reformation literature, see John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 131-34; and Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 158-59.

43. The Palmer picture underwent several transformations from edition to edition. The 1563 version features the text of the story at p. 1539, without any accompanying woodcut; in the 1570 edition (2124), the martyrdom is accompanied by a woodcut of a single, relatively youthful sufferer, captioned with Palmer's name; the 1576 edition (1840) once again presents a text with no picture. The uncaptioned, two-martyr woodcut first appears in 1583 (1940), and again in 1596 and 1610.

44. I owe this point to Thomas S. Freeman.

45. Frances A. Yates, “Queen Elizabeth as Astraea,” in her Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 29-87, esp. pp. 42-47. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 34, makes a similar point.

46. Seymour Byman, “Ritualistic Acts and Compulsive Behaviour: The Pattern of Tudor Martyrdom,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 625-43, argues that this is more than Foxe's perception, that in fact his martyrs really were reenacting the deaths of pre-Nicene martyrs, especially in the manner in which they reassured themselves that they were not simply committing suicide, and in their behavior at the stake: seen in this light, John Bradford's presentation of money to his jailers can be interpreted as a conscious reenactment of St. Cyprian's gift to the headsman in a.d. 258. Byman's argument is open to dispute and probably overrates the learning of many of the real, historical martyrs, but it does clarify the reasons Foxe seems so determined to cast many of them as replicas of their pre-Nicene predecessors.

47. The same impulse to comprehensiveness includes not just martyrs, but also details of church history. Foxe includes a verse he found from a manuscript chronicle on the battle of Brimford between Athelstan and the Danes, “which because they should not be lost, I thought not unworthie heere of rehearsall” (134.A.38-71).

48. For the medieval heritage of the Faerie Queene, see Lewis, “The Faerie Queene,” in Allegory of Love, 297-360.

An early version of this chapter was read at the Renaissance Society of America national meeting at Harvard University in 1989. It has been much revised since, and I have been able to expand the scope of the enquiry and conduct much additional research, thanks to generous grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Faculty of Graduate Studies Research Development Fund at Dalhousie University. A short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library permitted me to recheck my material and examine several editions of Foxe simultaneously. In addition to my coeditor and other contributors to the present volume, I am grateful to Devorah Greenberg, Arthur J. Slavin, Peter Herman, Martha Yeide, Thomas S. Freeman, and Paul Christianson for their critical comments on the chapter in its various versions. I am also indebted, for further valuable insights on Foxe, to Annabel Patterson and Patrick Collinson. None of the aforementioned bears any responsibility for the opinions expressed, nor for any errors committed.