[In the following essay, Tribble considers Foxe's work in light of its structure, claiming that in addition to what the text says, the accompanying illustrations, layout, and paper type were critical in helping Foxe convey his message to the reader.]

The critical role of the structure of the page in shaping reading experience has often been overlooked, in part because of the traditional segregation of social history, bibliography, and literary criticism and theory. In particular, the so-called extratextual has often been ignored. Such elements of the bibliographic code as annotations, title pages, illustrations, and typographical configurations have been consistently undervalued in literary and cultural studies. Often they are invisible, either because of modern editions that efface extratextual marks or because apparatus becomes so much a part of our mental furniture that it is simply ignored. Yet, if rendered visible, the page has much to tell us.

And the pages of the early modern books are aggressively visible—no discreet transparency of typography here. Reading was in large part a social act, and the pages reflect this characteristic, so long as the social is not confused with mere sociability. Modern books look austere in comparison to the hubbub on the page of early books, as writers jostle other writers, mock their opponents from the margins, and typefaces compete for attention, blackletter, roman, and italic promiscuously mixed. In short, the early modern page is “peopled,” inhabited by a variety of voices often at cross-purposes with one another.

The practice of confutation, in which one's opponents were invited onto the page, there to be confronted and, it is hoped, defeated, provides a key instance of the peopled page of the early modern period. Religious issues, of course, invited confutation and polemic like no others, and the sixteenth century in England saw an unprecedented explosion of polemical material, as Catholic attacked Protestant, reforming Protestants attacked their more traditional brethren, and Church apologists issued counterattacks. If the Reformation began with a promise to clear away the clutter of scholastic quibbles and quiddities and return to the plain truth, it ended in a flurry of dissent and detraction, a situation mirrored by the competition and contention on the surface of the page. Protestant Reformers in particular were caught in a paradox between their contention that the meaning of the Bible was “plain” and the obvious fact that its meaning was subject to constant debate. The page was a key site for such a paradox to be revealed, especially since the early modern practice of printing copious notes could give the impression that text and interpretation were coterminous or, indeed, that comment and contention were in danger of displacing the so-called text itself.

Pages in the period often seem noisy and messy; the practice of reproducing the text under attack often produced a cacophony of polemic and competing typography. To take one example: The confutation of the mishapen Aunswer to the misnamed, wicked Ballade, called the Abuse the ye blessed Sacrament of the aultare. Wherein thou haste (gentele Reader) the ryghte understandynde of al the places of Scriptures that Myles Hoggard, (with his learned counsall) hath wrested to make for the transubstanciacion of the bread and wyne.¹ The title alone, in its angry and tendentious rehearsal of the argument, makes obvious the texture of the dispute. The author of the confutation, Robert Crowley, figures his contribution to the dispute in martial terms. He decides to answer the Catholic polemicist Miles Hoggard “in lyke maner: I thought it my dutie … to ouerthrowe thys their bullwarke, that these proude philistians maye knowe that the Lorde of hostes hath not lefte his church so destitute of the good gyftes of the spirite, but that the verie little ones (of his armie) are able to drive them from al theyr holdes, and cause them to flee when theyr stubborne stomaches will not suffer them to yelde to the trueth” ([A1r]). The text page visually underscores this rhetoric; three texts compete for priority: a reforming Protestant ballad entitled “Abuse of ye blessed Sacrament,” Hoggard's “mishaphen Aunswer” (also in ballad form) to the first ballad, and Crowley's prose confutation of the second ballad, marked off with a printer's hand. The central point of contention is transubstantiation: the first ballad reads: “I loked in the pixte Dome gods I saw there / Made of the priestes”; the “Aunswer” chastises the ballad for its “folishe” jesting at the “consecrate” host; the confutation in turn argues that the “naturall proprietie” of the sacrament “is to preache and declare vnto vs the unitie of christians in the bodie and bloude of Christ by fayth more plainely than can be declared with wordes” (Crowley Biiiv-Biiiir). Yet signs are not plain, any more than words are; the charge and countercharge displayed on the page show as much. As the polemical character of the text page itself reveals, “unity” has become a contested and divisive concept.

Polemic could also break the boundaries of the page, spilling over and producing books that attempted to surround and consume other books. This happens with the Bible itself. The history of biblical translations in English reveals a dynamic in which the putative plain and simple truth of the Bible demands increasingly to be buttressed by exposition; the Geneva Bible, a favorite of reforming Protestants, is published studded with marginal commentary designed to guide the faithful and confute the faithless. Two of the most polemical of Bibles in this period are given over entirely to confutation: the Rheims New Testament of 1582 and William Fulke's 1589 response to it.² The Rheims-Douay Bible was produced to facilitate disputation with Protestants by providing an authorized English translation. Thus, the page—and indeed the book as a whole—is conceived as a weapon in a bitterly fought theological and political battle. The battle over a key transubstantiation verse—Matthew 26:26, “Take, eat, this is my body”—was particularly contentious. The Rheims New Testament annotates the verse in considerable detail:

26. This is.) The bread and the Wine be turned into the body and bloud of Christ by the same omnipotent power by which the World was made, and the Word was incarnate in the wombe of the virgin. Damas.li.4.c14 Cypr. de.Coen.Dominio, Amb.li.de myst.init.c.9

26. My body) He said not, This bread is a figure of my body: or, This wine is a figure of my bloud: but, This is my body, and, This is my blood. Damasc.lc.4.c.25. Theophyl. in hunc locum conc.2. Nic.act.6, eiusdem actionis in fine. When some fathers call it a figure or signe, they meane the outwarde formes of bread and wine.³

In the margin next to the annotations is the terse gloss “Transubstantiation”; just below “No figurative but a real presence.” Each small section of the verse demands its own exposition, buttressed by the authority of patristic scholarship. The commentary that surrounds the verse is intended to defend it from the attacks of Protestant reformers (insistently referred to as the “heretics”) who have attacked the very foundation of worship by disputing the interpretation of this verse.

The battle is joined a few years later by William Fulke, who in 1589 brought out a counteredition entitled The Text of the New Testament of Iesus Christ, Translated out of the vulgar Latin of the traiterous Seminarie at Rhemes, With Arguments of Bookes, Chapters and Annotation pretending to discover the corruptions of diueros Translations and to cleare the controversies of these dayes, Whereunto is added the translation out of the original Greeke commonly used in the Church of England. With a confutation of all such arguments, glosses, and annotations.⁴ As in Crowley's book, the title itself suggests the argumentative nature of the volume, and the appearance of the printed page reinforces that impression. Fulke organizes the page to enact a contestatory dialog with the Rheims text, reprinting the original matter of the Rheims New Testament with his commentary. In the margins are the alternating rubrics “Rhem” and “Fulke.” The commentary of the Rheims New Testament is sandwiched between his own confutation, and the scriptural text is driven off the page by the annotations, which take up over a full spread of pages. After an exhaustive refutation of every Catholic argument about the verse, Fulke finally writes:

Fulke. 9. The text is plaine, he said, This is my body, This is my blood, to declare, that he gaue to the faith of the worthy receiver, his very body and blood, by those outward elements of bread and wine, which are figures and signes of his body and blood.

(58-59)

The very text page reveals how ludicrous is the claim the “text is plaine.” Text engenders commentary, which in turn engenders refutation. The page itself swamps Fulke, the snarl of comment enveloping the central text, undermining the claim about plainness. For Fulke, to marginalize the text of the Rheims New Testament is to publish it, to distribute it widely, giving voice and space to his opponents, allowing them to inhabit its pages.

JOHN FOXE AND HIS DETRACTORS: WORDS, FLESH, AND THE PAGE

No page is more peopled than those in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (better known as the Book of Martyrs), which will be the focus of much of the remainder of my essay. I can scarcely do justice to this immensely influential work in this brief space. Foxe's work, a massive record of the martyrs of the Protestant Church primarily focusing upon the reign of Mary Tudor, is now one of the great unread books of Anglo-American culture. No twentieth-century edition exists, probably due to the formidable difficulties of editing and production the enormous book presents.⁵ Nor is it an easy read; modern readers are apt to be put off by its huge bulk and its encyclopedic tendencies—examination after examination, letter after letter, is reproduced, each exhaustively recording the interrogation and burning of martyr after martyr. It was published in English four times in Foxe's lifetime: 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583. Each successive edition during his lifetime (and the book had a strong afterlife, printed well into the early twentieth century, though often in so changed a form that Foxe himself would have been hard put to recognize it) gained accretions, until the 1583 edition reached well over two thousand folio pages.⁶

Foxe orchestrates a wide variety of materials to construct his narrative. His approach is exhaustively inclusive: royal proclamations, countless interrogations and disputations, endless letters, important reforming documents such as Simon Fish's Supplication of the Beggars, all are reproduced. The effect is of a polyphony of voices—the interrogator, the “unlearned” believer, the scholar, the royal proclamation—guided from the margin and within the text by Foxe himself.

Acts and Monuments endlessly repeats a central agon: the powerless, often unlearned victim confutes the powerful, learned inquisitor; the ensuing death of the martyr is faced bravely, guaranteeing the spiritual victory.⁷ The victory is underscored both by Foxe's comments in the text block and his remarks from the margins, which are designed to guide the reader to the correct understanding of the struggle. Such guidance was particularly necessary when the martyrs Foxe chronicled seem to step over the line dividing dissent and sedition, plain-speaking and insolence.⁸ The case of Alice Driver is instructive in this regard. Alice Driver was first presented for likening Queen Mary to Jezebel. Foxe is careful to claim that she makes the comparison on the sole basis of Mary's persecution of the faithful, rather than on grounds that might be considered seditious by his readers. Nevertheless, she receives the secular penalty for speaking slander against the queen: “her ears are cut off.”⁹ In the examination that follows, Foxe presents her as continually transgressing gender and social boundaries; she enters with a “smilyng countenaunce” and tells the examiners that she laughs at “what fooles ye be” (1941). When, despite her lowly status, she is able to debate her examiners to silence on the subject of transubstantiation, she exults: “Now,” said she, “ye be not able to resist the truth, ye command me to prison again. Well, the Lord in the end shall judge our cause and to him I leave it. I wis, I wis, this gear will go for no payment then.” Foxe's marginal comment reads: “Gascoine's mouth stopped” (1942). This scene plays out in miniature several of Foxe's favorite points: the ability of Scripture, even or especially as read and interpreted by the common folk, to confute the sophistical and arid theology of the Papists; the reliance of the Catholics on force rather than biblical authority; and the ultimate victory of the faithful at the Last Judgment. These themes are underscored at the next examination, when Driver asks her interrogator to prove something by scriptural quotation. He stalls: “‘I cannot tell the place, but there it is.’ With that she desired him to look in his Testament. Then he fumbled and sought about him for one, but at that time he had none; and that he knew well enough, though he seemed to search for it.” Foxe's margin reminds us of her victory: “The papists put to silence by a simple woman” (1943). It is indicative of the extraordinary power of the book that the spiritual high point for Foxe occurs when a priest is unable to find his Bible. The struggle is won by the ability to negotiate the terrain of the Bible; the victory is buttressed by Foxe's marginal note.

Foxe also reinforces this sense of competition and struggle visually, both in the illustrations to the book and in the charts and tables he uses to elucidate key points. An important element of the texture of the page are the illustrations, woodcuts famous for their gory depictions of burnings at the stake, stretching on the racks, and so on. I shall discuss here only the frontispiece, disappointingly tame in comparison with some of the others. The frontispiece book signals that the dispute over the Eucharist will be at its heart, this one text overflowing its boundaries to encompass the entire history of the Western church. The competing forms of worship flank the title, the true church to the left, the false to the right. At the bottom left a preacher speaks to a group listening attentively, some holding Bibles open on their laps. Just to their right a group receives the revelation of the name of Jehovah, figured in Hebrew script. The martyrs just above raise their horns in praise of God even as they burn on the stake; they are easily translated above to the status of angels triumphantly worshiping Christ. On the right we see the insistent interest in the material and gestural: the people listening to the priest in the pulpit finger rosary beads; a group follows the host in a Corpus Christi celebration. Just above is a priest, his back turned to the observers, raising the host for consecration. Ironically, the attempt at elevation is foiled, as just above him the devil casts the misbelievers down into hell. The traditional Catholic iconography that links the elevated host to the body of Christ (as in Raphael's Disputato, in which the eye is led upward from the host to Christ triumphant) is thus literally turned on its head.

Thus, the frontispiece presents competing modes of worship, the one spiritual, the other material, excessively concerned with such accoutrements as gowns, beads, and pageants. This assessment is made explicit in Foxe's attempt to surround and destroy—marginally—the text of the mass itself. At the outset of his exhaustive account of Mary's reign he includes “The whole canon of the Masse with the Rubrick thereof, as it standeth in the massebooke after Salisbury use, translated woorde by woorde out of Laten into Englyshe.” The text is dotted both by rubrics indicating the gesture of the cross and by Foxe's keyed annotations, which he expounds from the margins. Standing on the sidelines, he cavils and carps at every turn. The line “The peace of the lord(e) + be alwayes + with + you” is interrupted by rubrics, signifying that the priest is to perform the sign of the cross. Foxe comments from the margin: “e So many crosses wold make a man think, that here were none but Poppes, & popish crucifiers of christ” (892).

Foxe also mocks the excessive attention to the material, shown in the minute attention to the priest's every gesture.

Which praier being said(c) let the prest go to the right side of the altar, with the chalice betwene his ha[n]ds, hys fingers being yet ioyned together as afore and lette the subdeacon approch nere, & power out wine and water into the chalice. And let the priest rence his ha[n]ds, lest any parcels of the body or blood be left behind in his fingers or in the chalice(e).

Foxe writes: “(d) A dangerous matter, I tell you” (893), an attempt to undo the concern with the ritual that, Foxe would argue, has elevated the signifier at the expense of the signified. As one of Foxe's detractors would say of a similar passage, Foxe “playeth the fool in this place, both in text & margent.”¹⁰

The nineteenth-century edition of Foxe prints these notes at the bottom of the page, picking and choosing the juiciest and interspersing them with their own.¹¹ Yet the shock value is considerably lessened when they are placed at the bottom rather than on the side; the constant interruption from the margin, particularly at the most sacred points, those gestures that cannot be represented with mere words, indeed gives the effect of a scoffer who has made his way into the church. The intrusion of the marginal commentary at the most sacred moments—elevation, blessing, the ringing of the sacring bell—provides a verbal analogue to the dynamic of elevation and deflation that we saw in the frontispiece.

Foxe's work is not considered as polemic, being better known as part of the Elizabethan settlement's attempt to construct a national church.¹² The book was considered edifying enough that it was ordered to be set up in cathedral churches along with the Bishop's Bible, “for the use of strangers or servants.”¹³ Yet, as John Knott has pointed out, “the major irony of [its] reception” was that this same book “fuelled resistance to the church's authority.”¹⁴ Like the Bible, another encyclopedic book that offered many different modes of reading, Foxe's book contained material within it capable of supporting a variety of ideological positions.

Yet Foxe's contemporaries know polemic when they saw it. Thomas Harding vigorously condemned the “huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs … heretics, thieves, church-robbers, murderers, rebels, and traitors.”¹⁵ Such rhetoric was taken even further by the Jesuit Robert Parsons, who published a confutation of Foxe in 1603-4. Parsons takes Foxe on martyr by martyr, reproducing the examinations and providing his own commentary upon them. He is particularly contemptuous of Alice Driver, who epitomizes the sorry “sort of people” with whom Foxe associates. He reprints much of the examination, marked out with quotation marks and peppered with his own sardonic marginal comments: “Alice Driver a famous doctor” (254) or “mark the argument of a spincer against a Doctor” (257). Rather paradoxically, he claims both that “her learned answers [were] framed out of Fox his own brain” and that she exhibits gross arrogance in pitting herself against the learned doctors. On the one hand, he treats her as beneath contempt, Foxe's claims for her spiritual victory being merely laughable. Yet, on the other, he bothers to answer her objections to the doctrine of the Real Presence. This strategy is dangerous, however; despite his dismissal of the woman, her arguments are given the dignity of response. The learned citations in the margin, designed to buttress his own arguments, rebound upon him and accord her credibility.

This strategy also produces rather strained results in the calendar section, which precedes the discursive refutation of Foxe. Parsons and others were particularly outraged by Foxe's calendar prefaced to the Acts and Monuments, in which the traditional Catholic saints were razed and a new set introduced in their place. Parsons produces a calendar of Roman Catholic martyrs designed to confute Foxe's calendar of Protestant martyrs. The competing calendars are organized on facing pages—on the right are Parsons's martyrs, presented with a buildup of authority, social and textual, as in “this was a Lady” or “this was a Noble man,” accompanied by buttressing learned citations of the Church Fathers. On the left are the rabble of Foxe's martyrs, identified scornfully with their occupation or social place: “This was a proud arrogant fellow, by occupation a cook, who joining with a painter as insolent as himself used intolerable and contemptuous words” (3:[4]).

Parsons refers to his “dubble Calendar” as a “certayne antidotum … against the admiration of such boldness in going to the fire for maintenance of heresies, as Foxe would stirre vp, by the example of so great a multitude of his Martyrs” (2:20). Comparison of the two will show “that the one conteyneth a most noble ranke of holy seruants of Christ” and the other “a poore rabble of later phantasticall people proud willfull, and obstinate in their particular opinions” (v.2:20).

But which is the poison and which the antidote? Following the calendar Parsons provides “the svmmme of all saints” named in both calendars:

In the Catholike Calendar. The number of mention 3704. whereof are Popes Martyrs 27 Popes Confessors 8. Bishops Martyrs 37. Bishops Confessors 63. Virgins Martyrs 76 (besides the 11000. slayne with s. Vrsula) Virgins Confessors 11 Kinges and Queens Martyrs 3 K and Q Confessors 8. Other holy men and weomen Martyrs 3429. other men and weomen Confessors 42. All these were of one faith and Religion agreeable to the Roman at this day.

In the Foxian Calendar

The number of all mentioned 456. Bishops-pseudomartyrs 5. Bishops Confessors 1. Virgin martyrs 000. mayd-martyrs 3. Kinges and Queenes Martyrs and Confessors 1. Other men and weomen Martys 393. Other men and weomen Confessors 53.

These were of diuers sorts and opinions, and contrary in many points the one to the other. As for example: Waldensians & Albeigensians 13. Lollards and Wickliffians 36. Hussits & Lutherans 78. Zuinglians and Caluinists 268. Anabaptists, Puritans, and doubtful of what sect 59. Against these were Husbandmen, weavers, sawyers, shoemakers, and curriers, smiths and other such like occupations 282. poor women and spinsters 64. Apostate monks and friars 25. Apostate Priests 28. ministers 10 Public malefactors, and condemned by the laws for such 19 &c.

(3:[29])

Parsons pauses here, because, after all, this is a lot of dead people. Just after the calendar he prints a letter to the reader warning against the harboring sympathy of “horror of mind” at reading of so many deaths. He reassures his readers that “it was necessary justice and no cruelty” (3:[A1r]). Thus, Foxe's martyrs arise from the dead; displayed in such numbers on the page, they have the power to evoke pity at least, if not belief.

So, is it a good idea to rub shoulders with one's enemy? Such a strategy has a long history, one thrown into relief by examining the page as a unit. To accord space on the page to an opponent is to take a risk; there is something both agonistic and potentially equalizing about the margin. The polemical page sees the truth as plain, but to prove this point it is necessary to crosshatch it with notes, to reproduce large chunks of the opposing view, and to do so with little clear hierarchy, since the page is organized horizontally as much as vertically. Authority can thus become potentially unstable. The best known of Elizabethan apologists, Richard Hooker, knew enough to move his opponents off the page almost entirely.¹⁶ Yet for Foxe the risk perhaps was worth taking, the strategy successful. The history of his text shows the advantages of assimilating and neutralizing opposing texts.¹⁷

SOME NOTES ON NOTES

Perhaps here we might see the advantages in the move to footnotes a century later. Footnotes and type gradations provide a visual means of establishing hierarchy. Pope's famous typographical system for apportioning praise and blame in his edition of Shakespeare is perhaps the most telling instance. “Some suspected passages which are excessively bad … are degraded to the bottom of the page, with an asterisk referring to the places of their insertion.” “Degrading” excessively bad passages to the bottom of the page visually reinforces the hierarchies of taste and class Pope attempts to impress on the text (one of the reasons the errors imposed by the players are so gross is that “that class of people was then far inferior to what it is in our days. … The top of the profession were then mere players, not gentleman of the stage”).¹⁸ The pecking order of good/bad, tasteful/tasteless, is considerably less clear when the suspect passage is placed to the side, where the offending passage might be seen to be in direct competition with its betters. Pope also used the vertical resources of the page to good effect in the Dunciad Variorum, when he cast his opponents down into the roil of footnotes at the bottom of the page.

And, since we are in the late age of print, perhaps, or at least the early days of digital culture, it might be worth considering what happens when the line between the primary and secondary texts, original and annotation, breaks down entirely. George Landow and other utopic writers about hypertext celebrate this phenomenon as essentially liberatory; old hierarchies are broken down, and all readers are free to enjoy the free play of signifiers. Dystopic writers on the other hand see associational thinking replacing analysis.¹⁹ I wish to make no grand claims but only to wonder: what happens to the footnote? The distinction between text and margin breaks down, part of the general process of leveling that is lauded or lamented, depending upon whether one is of the utopic or dystopic persuasion.

Yet, if the margin is missing from cyberspace—or if it is indistinguishable from the center—polemic is certainly alive and well. No one reading newsgroups for the first time can fail to be struck by the contentiousness of the genre. This phenomenon has been variously explained—often as the result of the lack of context that might otherwise be supplied by such material elements as paper and ink—and little emoticons, winks and smiles made on the keyboard, are prescribed. But I wonder whether such contentiousness is a “revenge effect” (to use Edward Tenner's term) of quoting software.²⁰ Never has it been so easy to quote your opponent, pick his words apart, and insert one's own devastating rebuttal. A keystroke suffices. If newsgroup postings had titles, they would sound almost Elizabethan: “A Learned response to the Mishapen answer to the question of whether groundhogs should be poisoned or humanely trapped.” Anyone familiar with newsgroups has seen postings such as these, with quotes within quotes, each reposting becoming increasingly cranky, the first posting picked apart and interrogated until the original sense of the message becomes submerged in a sea of quote and counterquote. Often the quotation will become misattributed, as the name breaks free of the original post and becomes attached to some later attack.

We have perhaps wandered a long way from Crowley, Foxe, Parsons, and the peopled page of early modern England. But the journey suggests the myriad of ways the material elements of type, paper, ink, and, yes, software shape our assumptions and our beliefs.

Notes

1. Robert Crowley, The Confutation (London, 1548); STC 6082.

2. I discuss these Bibles, among others, at greater length in Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), chap. 1.

3. The New Testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), 78-79; STC 2884.

4. The Text of the New Testament (London, 1589); STC 2888.

5. The edition most widely available is that of Stephen Cattley, first published in 1836-41. Later revised editions were edited by Josiah Pratt.

6. For textual history, see Warren Wooden, John Foxe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983); John Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (New York: Macmillan, 1940); William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Mark Breitenberg, “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” Renaissance and Reformation 25, no. 4 (1989): 381-407. Breitenberg makes note of the “iconic” nature of Foxe's text; he is one of the few writers to focus on the material elements of the Acts and Monuments. My quotations come from the 1563 edition, which I have collated with the 1576 and the 1583 edition. Quotations from Alice Driver come from the 1576 edition, which provides a fuller account of her testimony than the 1563 edition.

7. John Knott discusses this drama in chap. 2 of Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). He argues that the examination “largely displaces torture as the site of combat between the individual Christian and the authorities” (50).

8. John Knott discusses Foxe's tendency to “play down or ignore threats to the protestant unity he so strongly desired,” in Discourses of Martyrdom, 115-16. Richard Helgerson discusses the social threat many of the martyrs, including Driver, posed, in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 6.

9. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1576), 1941.

10. Robert Parsons, A Treatise of Three Conversions (1603-4), 268.

11. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. S. R. Cattley (London: R. B. Seeley, 1838), 6:362-68.

12. This position is argued most strenuously by Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. Helgerson modifies this argument in Discourses of Nationhood. In the nineteenth century, of course, Maitland and others attempted to prove that Foxe was merely a polemicist, making up his narrative out of whole cloth.

13. Qtd. in Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 221. The book was also to be displayed in the homes of officers of the church. Haller also notes that the book was “to be set up for all to read in city orphanages and the halls of city companies.” The long-standing legend that the Book of Martyrs was available in every parish church is, however, merely legend. See Leslie M. Oliver, “The Seventh Edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37 (1943): 243-60.

14. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 3.

15. Thomas Harding, Confutation (London, 1565); qtd. in Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 138.

16. Richard Helgerson discusses Hooker's abandonment of the old-style point-by-point rebuttal in Discourses of Nationhood, arguing that this strategy “decisively altered the feel of the argument. No longer did the combatants appear to be on quite the same plane” (280). W. Speed Hill has pointed out to me that the more mannered look of Hooker's page reinforces this impression.

17. I am grateful to John Knott for suggesting this perspective to me.

18. Alexander Pope, “Preface to Shakespeare,’ in Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 172.

19. Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tumon (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), provides a good sampling of writers on both camps; see also the more recent Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. George Landow (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

20. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Knopf, 1996).