SOURCE: Collinson, Patrick. “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-century Protestant Historiography.” In The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, edited by Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, pp. 37-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Collinson analyzes the controversy surrounding Foxe's work, focusing on issues of veracity in the text.]

I

John Foxe (and notwithstanding some glancing references to John Bale and Miles Coverdale, Foxe will serve on this occasion as shorthand for “sixteenth-century historiography”) had a great deal to say on the subject of “truth.” In a sense he wrote about nothing else. But he was accused by his religious opponents of telling lies on an unprecedented scale. And if he did not deliberately propagate fictions, in the sense of inventing his stories, he wove his material into forms that were as fictive as they were factual. Like his friend and mentor, Bale, he was a mythmaker, even, it has been said, “the prince of English historical mythmakers,”¹ which is not to say that he was not also a great historian. Jane Austen wondered why history was so dull, considering that so much of it was made up. One could say that what makes Foxe's history so arresting is that it is partly made up, or, given his models and materials, makes itself up.

In introducing a section of his Acts and Monuments that consists of little more than a collection of original documents of the early German and Swiss Reformations (presented with a minimum of commentary), Foxe wrote that he was giving readers “a sight thereof,” so that they would not believe the “smooth talk or pretensed persuasions of men,” especially in church matters, “unless they carry with them the simplicity of plain truth.”² That was to denigrate rhetoric and to equate “plain truth,” like some sixteenth-century Ranke, with unadorned documents, to tell the story as it actually (or evidently) was. The anachronism is obvious and intentional. Foxe was not Ranke. So what did sixteenth-century historiography mean by the simple or plain truth?

In approaching the question of truth, and of different orders or kinds of truth, as well as the distinctions to be made between truth and falsehood, fact and fiction, it is as convenient as it is thoroughly unoriginal to begin with Sir Philip Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie, a text itself not noted for its originality and greatly indebted to the classic definitional statements of Aristotle and Cicero. Yet Sidney states the issues so neatly that even his intended or unintended misunderstandings and oversimplifications give us the best of all purchases on the subject.³ According to Sidney, history claimed to stand for truth and the practical and ethical value of historical truth, what Foxe in one of his prefaces called “The Utility of This Story,” a past both true and usable. Aristotle was primarily responsible for the distinction between history, an account of real events, and fiction, and Cicero wrote that according to the somewhat undeveloped capacities of Roman (rather than Greek) historiography, “it is enough that the man should not be a liar” [satis est, non esse mendacem]. “For who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth?”⁴ So William Camden, in the preface to his Annales of Elizabeth, which in its 1625 English edition would be called The true and royall history of Elizabeth Queen of England, wrote: “Which Truth to take from History, is nothing else but, as it were, to pluck out the Eyes of the beautifullest Creature in the world; and, in stead of wholesome Liquor, to offer a Draught of Poison to the Readers Minds”—while going on to explain that he was not constrained to tell the whole truth: “Things secret and abtruse I have not pried into.”⁵ Sidney was ironically impressed by Cicero's austere standard of factual accuracy. The lips of historiographers “sound of things done,” Sidney wrote, and “verity” is “written in their foreheads.” And Sidney was skeptical withal, for when all was said and done, the historian authorized himself for the most part on other historians (nothing changes!), “whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay.”⁶

When Sidney questioned the usefulness of history, deflating the historian who claimed to be testis temporum, vita memoriae, nuncia vetustatis, he was of course repeating for the umpteenth but by no means the last time an old Ciceronian maxim. In 1599, the young John Hayward would introduce his Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII with the familiar words: “Heereupon Cicero doeth rightly call history the witnesse of times, the light of truth, the life of memory, and the messenger of antiquity. … Neyther is that the least benefit of history, that it preserveth eternally both the glory of good men and shame of evill.”⁷ Thomas Blundeville, in his pioneering The true order and methode of wrytinge and reading histories (1574), did not know whether to deride or pity the folly of those who, “having consumed all theyre lyfe tyme in hystories,” in the end knew nothing except trivial and useless dates, genealogies, “and such lyke stuff.”⁸

But so far as Sidney was concerned, the historian could not but be useless, since he was the ineluctable prisoner of his facts, “tied, not to what should be, but to what is, the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things.” If it were only a matter of having a story told truly rather than falsely, one would of course choose the truth, as with the commissioning of a portrait. No one prefers a poor likeness. But if the question be one of use or learning, then fictions are “more doctrinable,” for only fiction is free to favor virtue. The historian, “being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness.”⁹ Sidney might have been thinking of Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III, and of the doubts about its ethically instructive value that may have inclined More to leave that annal of tyranny and unbridled wickedness incomplete.¹⁰

Sidney knew full well, if only because Cicero had said it, that the bare distinction between historical fact and poetical fiction misrepresents what historians actually do. Even historiographers, he wrote, “have been glad to borrow both fashion and perchance weight of poets,” especially since, as he suggested in a satirical passage that deliberately confused the distinct functions of antiquarians and historians, authorities and sources are often inadequate and uncertain. So it was that historians put speeches into the mouths of their characters “which it is certain they never pronounced.” If Sidney had been widely read, more widely than he was, he would have known that the relation of the fictive and nonfictive in the classical discussion of such matters was more complex than his representation of them.¹¹ Cicero had taught that to tell the truth was indeed the foundation of history, but that the complete structure depended as much on the language of presentation as on material content: “Ipse autem exaedificatio posita est in rebus et verbis.” This was said in a treatise whose subject was rhetoric, De oratore, where history was classified as none other than a branch of rhetoric. “Videstine, quantum munus sit oratoris historia?” [Do you not see to what an extent history is the business of the rhetorician?]¹²

These commonplaces have a particular resonance with what will concern us in the bulk of this essay. But the conventions of Sidney's epideictic rhetoric prevented him from noticing how far these considerations, while serving his purpose to disparage history, simultaneously undermined his argument, which depended upon too rigid a distinction between history and fiction. Nevertheless, the two senses of truth with which Sidney dealt are fundamental to my argument. What is factually true, “the particular truth of things,” may be at odds with what is true in another and perhaps higher sense, the sense that the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote in Philippians 4.8: “Whatsoever things are true … whatsoever things are of good report … think on these things.”

Thomas Becon, a copious first-generation Protestant writer, defined truth as “Christ himself, the word of God,” but added: “There is also a civil truth or verity … and that is when with that which is said the thing appeareth, and when we find words agreeing with the thing itself.” Sidney professed to believe that there must be a conflict between these two senses of truth. John Foxe's huge enterprise in its entirety depended upon a denial of any such conflict.¹³

How do we account for Sidney's defensiveness? Was it more than a rhetorical pose? If we understand “poetry” in its modern sense, it may seem odd that Sidney should write of “this now scorned skill.” But if he is understood to have written of fiction, then indeed the historian of literary genres, aware of the slow gestation of the English novel through the almost two centuries separating Beware the Cat from Pamela, may share with Sidney some sense of fiction's arrested development. If Sidney had chosen to consider the problem at the level of customer and readership mentalities, he would have found in his own age ample evidence of the satisfaction derived from stories that were either factual or purported to be factual, over against the unashamedly fictive. This preference may have a deep-seated and perennial quality to it. Ghost stories told in darkened school dormitories lose their point if they are not half believed as true stories; so too with magazines like True Stories, the improbable but always “true” stories I read in my youth in Wide World Magazine, and with newspaper columns like “Strange But True” or “Ripley's Believe It or Not.” In Britain, the willingly gullible buy a paper (it claims to be a newspaper) with headlines like “World War II Bomber Found on Moon.” Huge sums are spent on supposedly “authentic” works of antique art, and sometimes good money is thrown after bad in efforts to prove, or disprove, their authenticity, leading to reflections on “our obsession with originality and oldness.” The pleasing fiction of a forgery, however cunningly contrived, has a limited value.¹⁴

One might make a similar point about the resurrection narratives in the New Testament, or about the Book of Mormon, prefaced as it is with the testimonies of witnesses who had seen and “hefted” with their hands the very gold plates from which Joseph Smith by mysterious means derived the text. There are sophisticated accounts of both Christianity and Mormonism that hold their doctrines and aspirations to be “true,” more or less regardless of the literal truth of the historical events on which they are founded. However, neither Christianity nor Mormonism would be likely to survive the discrediting to universal satisfaction of its historical-factual credentials, for all that Sidney suggests that the New Testament might well be more “doctrinable” if it were fiction than if it consisted of an accurate, unadorned account of certain historical facts.

The case as it concerns sixteenth-century literary and subliterary tastes and genres can be illustrated at random from the titles of relatively ephemeral products of the Elizabethan and early Stuart press, in which reports, however improbable and unreliable, are presented to the gullible reader as “true” and fully attested;¹⁵ and, said Ben Jonson (in The Staple of News) “no syllable of truth in them.” The subject may be wonders and monsters, as with The true description of two monsterous chyldren born at Herne in Kent, a ballad of 1565; or remarkable “providences,” such as A true relation of two most strange accidents lately happening at Chagford (1618); murders—A true report of the murther committed in the house of Sir J. Bowes (1607), The lamentable and true tragedie of M. Arden of Faversham (1592); foreign wars—A brief and true rehersall of the victory which the protestantes of Holland had against the duke of Alba (1573); voyages and discoveries—A true discourse of the late voyage of discoverie: for finding a passage to Cathaya (1578), A briefe and true relation of the discoverie of the north Part of Virginia (1602); even romantic fiction—The true history of the tragick loves of Hipolito and Isabella, Neapolitans, Englished (1628). Groups of men in the alehouse who greeted new arrivals from London with “what news?” also validated their own reports with “if what I say be not true.” This was called for, given the notorious unreliability of “news.” Joseph Mede of Cambridge, who received and passed on the news on a regular basis, could write of “the newes of the day among our Speculatives in Paules” (i.e., the nave or “walk” of St. Paul's Cathedral) and frequently reported that such news as the death of Spinola or the duke of Buckingham's departure for the Ile de Rhé had proved false. But the fear of false rumor implied the high premium placed on accuracy. Preachers who used the “if what I say be not true” formula in the pulpit were being indecorous and could find themselves reported in jest books, like the “very ridiculous” minister of Halstead in Essex, William Glibery, who used to say “if what I say be not true ye may hang me for the veriest knave in Halstead.” For Scripture was self-authenticating, requiring no such warranties as to its truth. One implication of the utterly authentic scriptural norm was a process of self-censorship that tended to inhibit any publication that, far from being “true,” was unashamedly fictional.¹⁶

In this broad sense, all histories published in the sixteenth century claimed to be true, even while the distinction between “history” and “story” was still blurred, the tales of Arthur being presented as history, even by those who admitted that if not entirely false they contained substantial elements of the mythical.¹⁷ One might suppose that when it was reported, in the early-seventeenth-century, that men read Foxe's Book of Martyrs (as Acts and Monuments was popularly called) as “a book of credit, next to the book of God,” that was to accord to Foxe a special, near-scriptural status. But secular chronicles, too, were “credited” in the same way, Holinshed's Chronicles calling itself, and in principle all chronicles, books of “credit.”¹⁸ Claims to be credited were built into virtually every publication asserting historical status. Thus, George Cavendish, in his Thomas Wolsey, late Cardinall. his lyffe and deathe, refers in his preface to the “malycious ontrowthe of others,” and offers to replace untruth with truth. “Therfore I commyt the treuthe to hym that knowyth all trouthe.” The opening words of the text that follows are: “Trewthe it ys.” That Cavendish ends his life of Wolsey with the story of how he, the author, lied to the king and the council about the cardinal's last words following the advice of an experienced courtier—“if ye tell them the treuthe … you should undo yorself”—is a complicating and enriching circumstance, for it suggests that truth is a thing of onionlike layers.¹⁹

Was Cavendish telling the truth about his lie? It was unusual to admit to a falsehood. In the first Elizabethan edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), the Marian martyr John Careless would not admit to his judges that there were any serious doctrinal differences among the heretics confined in the various London prisons. Asked whether he knew the notorious antipredestinarian free-willer Henry Hart, he denied it. “But yet I lied falsely, for I knew him indeed and his qualities too well.” In all subsequent editions, Careless's frank admission was suppressed, presumably as incompatible with the truth that the martyrs were supposed to have expressed in all their speeches and actions. And that too was a kind of lie.²⁰ Whether it could ever be lawful to tell a lie in a good cause had been debated by St. Augustine and St. Jerome, and the issue was never far away from the religious controversies of the sixteenth century, as Perez Zagorin has shown.²¹ Sometimes only a lie could preserve the truth.

How much did truth matter? Daniel Woolf suggests that what was lacking in Tudor and early Stuart historiography was “a reason for divergent points of view,” since “historical narrative had yet to be firmly tied to the wagon of ideological and political conflict.”²² That undervalues the passions aroused throughout the sixteenth century by conflicting accounts of national origins, and in particular by the question of the British History. This version of the island's story had been immortalized and to a great extent fabricated in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, an excellent example, with all its prolific Arthurian progeny and many afterlives, of the difficulty of defining a history as distinct from a romance in anything like modern terms. We cannot even be certain that Geoffrey was not having his joke at the expense of the past, intentionally but covertly writing a kind of fiction. The later Middle Ages and Renaissance would witness many such sportive literary exercises, one of them called Utopia. Polydore Vergil said some caustic things about Geoffrey and conjured up the ghost of Gildas to exorcise him. John Leland was duly angry with Polydore, as was the Welsh antiquary Humphrey Llwyd, who also attacked the rival account of Scottish origins purveyed by Hector Boece and later by George Buchanan. But it is true that many of the authors who ventured into this minefield wrote within the polite convention of referring judgment in the matter to the reader and declining to adopt a rigid position in a case so uncertain. Even Camden wrote that he would be the last to stand in the way of anyone who might want to believe in the story of Brutus and his Trojans: “For mine owne parte, let Brutus be taken for the father, and founder of the British nation. I will not be of a contrarie minde,” adding later, “I refer the matter full and whole to the Senate of Antiquaries, for to be decided.”²³

In the extensive learned apparatus that he contributed to Michael Drayton's prodigious chorographical and hydrological poem, Poly-Olbion, John Selden gently reprehended the credence that the poet still attached to the British History, although he knew full well that part of Drayton's motive was to be as tactful as possible to the Welsh, those “Cambro-Britons” who certainly had to be allowed to believe such things, whether true or not.²⁴

II

Only very occasionally was John Foxe willing in this fashion to defer to the indifferent judgment of his readers. A rare example of his use of this trope concerns the ecclesiastical miracles recorded by the early church historian Eusebius, “wherof let every reader use his own judgement.”²⁵ It was fundamental to Foxe's essentially polemical purpose on no account to condescend to historical ignorance or condone false notions about the past. In a preface addressed to the queen, he explained that he wrote in English for the sake of the common reader who was wrapped in blindness, all “for wanting the light of history.” In another preface he wrote:

For, first, to see the simple flock of Christ, especially the unlearned sort, so miserably abused, and all for ignorance of history, not knowing the course of times and true descent of the church, it pitied me that this part of diligence had so long been unsupplied in this my-country church of England.²⁶

So, relatively speaking, Woolf is not wrong to suggest that the arena of ecclesiastical history represents an exceptional case in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century historiography, exceptional that is for involving extreme ideological conflict over competing versions of truth. For in this arena, the question of truth had an urgent life-and-death quality. Indeed, on the distinction between truth and error lay matters beyond life and death and of transcendent importance. So Bishop Latimer spoke of “peace” as a “goodly word,” and “unity” as a “fair thing.” “[But] peace ought not to be redeemed … with the loss of the truth; that we should seek peace so much, that we should lose the truth of God's word.” The Elizabethan Catholic controversialist Thomas Stapleton was no less willing to pay the price of truth: “Truth purchaseth hatred.” “Therefore,” Latimer went on,

whereas ye pray for agreement both in the truth and in uttering of the truth, when shall that be, as long as we will not hear the truth, but disquiet with crafty countenance the preachers of the truth, because they reprove our evilness with the truth. And to say the truth, better it were to have a deformity in preaching, so that some would preach the truth of God.²⁷

Here were seven “truth's” in seventy words!

Ecclestiastical historiography during this period saw fierce conflicts. There were fierce conflicts over truth, not only between parties but within parties and their minds and consciences. Bishop Jewel observed that truth and falsehood were near neighbors: “The utter porch of the one is like the porch of the other; yet their way is contrary; the one leadeth to life; the other leadeth to death; they differ little to the shew. … Thereby it happeneth that men be deceived; they call evil good, falsehood truth.”²⁸

Thomas Harding, the Elizabethan Catholic apologist with whom Jewel had a great controversy, and who attacked Foxe, had begun, like Jewel, as the Protestant disciple of Peter Martyr. Archbishop Cranmer was forever invoking truth. Henry VIII told him, “For suerlie I reckon that you will tell me the truth.” But in the last hours of his life, Cranmer first recanted the beliefs of his religious maturity as heresies, prefacing his recantation with “now is time and place to say truth”; he then renounced his recantations, with remorse for having acted “contrary to my conscience and the truthe.”²⁹ Foxe wrote to make the distinction between truth and error objective and unmistakable, in the tribunal of history.

The “plain” or “simple” truth to which Protestants were attached had a different appearance from the truth professed by Catholic controversialists. It belonged to a set of values that identified purity with simplicity and plainness and rejected what were perceived as Catholicism's elaborate, man-made ritual and theatrical excess. Protestants, as John King has observed, rejected any substitution of artifice for truth.³⁰ The truth that was simplicity itself was biblical truth, which was held to be literal and self-evident, and which was best articulated in the plain style of Tyndale's biblical mode and Latimer's pulpit voice, as well as in the plain shepherd's tongue that Spenser appropriated from the fourteenth century. Of course the so-called plain style was never artless. Artis celare artem. Nicholas Udall wrote of the English version of Erasmus's New Testament Paraphrases: “For divinitie, lyke as it loveth no cloking, but loveth to be simple and playn, so doth it not refuse eloquence, if the same come without injurie or violacion of the truth.” Erasmus's translators had eschewed elegance of speech for “a plain style,” so that “rude and unlettred people” should not be deprived of a true understanding.³¹

In Foxe, style and language are inseparable from the populist strategy that aimed the book at the more or less common people who to such a conspicuous extent throng the pages, both as martyrs and spectators of martyrdom. Hence all those extremely vivid illustrations, no less than 160 of them in the 1570 edition. Yet there is a tension between this almost “tabloid” presentation and the extreme bulk, and expense, of the text illustrated, for how many of the “rude and unlettred” had access to a book costing half a year's wages? The word “strategy,” then, is used advisedly, and to indicate another of Foxe's rhetorical tropes. Whether the English Reformation really enjoyed the popular basis that the trope regularly invokes is a question that has divided recent historians of those events, the so-called revisionists and their allegedly Whiggish opponents. If the revisionists are right in their denial that the Reformation was a demotic affair, then the blame may be laid on Foxe, who, the revisionists say, their opponents follow all too faithfully.³²

Foxe did not claim inerrancy for his book in every detail (many modern historians have been less modest about their accomplishments), but he did regard the version of ecclesiastical history that it presented as in all essential respects true. His purpose was “to open the plain truth of times lying long hid in obscure darkness of antiquity.” Foxe's own question, however—“But what is in this world so … true that it will not be contraried?”—anticipated his critics. For Foxe's Catholic detractors, his book was not some curate's egg, good and bad in parts. It was all bad, consisting entirely of lies, “as full of lies as lines.” The Jesuit Robert Parsons claimed to have discovered more than 120 lies in less than three pages. “As though,” Foxe told the queen, “neither any word in all that story were true, nor any other story false in all the world besides.” Five years earlier, Thomas Stapleton, professing “zeale to the truth,” had assured Elizabeth that the faith of the English Church for nine hundred years had been “the true and right Christianitie.”³³

Foxe's claim to embody testis temporum, lux veritatis was rooted in his method, a plain but advanced historical method that placed a premium on the testimony of original sources and that pointed forward to the essentially Protestant professionalism of nineteenth-century historical positivists. To quote the title of the 1563 edition in some of its fullness: These were Acts and monuments … gathered and collected according to the true copies and wrytinges certificatorie, as wel of the parties themselves that suffered, as also out of the Bishops Registers which were the doers therof. It has been said that not least among Foxe's merits was that he discovered the Public Record Office.³⁴ The effect is best described as deceptively authentic, since while some of the sources had the ineluctable objectivity of official court records, others were highly subjective first-person accounts of trials recorded by the martyrs themselves, together with their letters and other remains, carefully edited.

Nevertheless, nobody any longer accuses Foxe of gross manipulation, still less of the fraudulent forging of his evidence of which he stood accused by his nineteenth-century critics. There is no need to spend time defending his basically sound practice as a transcriber and editor of documents. Historians can say that he was one of us. That is not to say that Foxe felt bound to publish all the evidence available to him, nor to deny that he often disregarded history's second law, according to Cicero, to make bold to tell the whole truth. We have already seen that embarrassing evidence, for example John Careless's holy lying, could be suppressed between one edition and the next. Faced with further scandalous details of theological dissension and of prevarication in the letters of the martyr John Philpot, which included a letter to Careless about the free-willers, Foxe and his editorial assistant Henry Bull discussed what to include, what to suppress. Stripped of the merely mundane, the letters of the martyrs appeared all the more sublime in their single-minded scriptural exultation.³⁵

Yet Foxe's appetite for historical information “for its own sake” sometimes took over. Among his papers in the Harleian manuscripts, there are nearly one hundred closely written folios, detailing the scandals, corruptions, and law suits that in the reign of Edward VI tore the Welsh diocese of St. David's apart and damaged the reputation of its first Protestant bishop, Robert Ferrar.³⁶ Ferrar suffered martyrdom under Mary, and his ordeal was hailed (from the safety of exile) by a fellow bishop: “O most happy Ferrar, more strong than yron!”³⁷ A correspondent later begged Foxe not to meddle with the St. David's case in the “augmentyng” of his history. “The controversye was for prophane matters and therfore unmeet for your hystorye. We must be cyrcumspect in owr doyngs that we geev the papysts no occasyon to accuse us for persecutors whych we lay so much to their charge.”³⁸ Foxe ignored this advice and printed all fifty-six articles indicting Ferrar of worldly-mindedness and gross pastoral neglect. For example, his enemies alleged that the bishop had spent all his time and labor in discovering mines, and that all his conversation had been about such worldly matters as “baking, brewing, enclosing, ploughing, mining, of mill-stones.”³⁹

Foxe's excuse for printing this unsavory stuff was that it would give other bishops warning “to be more circumspect, whom they should trust and have about them.” He may very well have had in mind the early Elizabethan bishop of Norwich, John Parkhurst, whose lack of worldly wisdom opened up his diocese to sharks and con men.⁴⁰ Foxe called Ferrar “twice a martyr” and printed his replies to the articles of accusation, defending his reputation and, as he moved on to the scene at the stake, freely calling him “godly Bishop Ferrar.” Ferrar told a sympathizer that “if he saw him once to stir in the pains of his burning, he should then give no credit to his doctrine.” Foxe added: “And as he said, so he right well performed the same.”⁴¹ But it is perhaps significant that Foxe placed in immediate juxtaposition to Ferrar's story a much fuller account of the only other Welsh martyr he records, the obscure and elderly Cardiff fisherman Rawlins White, who, as it happens, was burned in the same month as the bishop.⁴² The circumstantial details include White's urging the smith to make sure that he was chained fast to the stake, “for it may be that the flesh would strive mightily” (almost the same words attributed to Bishop Ridley in the same circumstances);⁴³ his arranging the straw around him to make a little shelf on which to lean to give “good ear and attention” to the sermon preached over him; and his appearing “altogether angelical”—a Polycarpian touch—with the white hairs sticking out from under his kerchief.⁴⁴ As with Holinshed's Chronicles, Foxe's material was not necessarily so haphazardly arranged as it may appear.

There is some rather more damaging evidence to which I among others have drawn attention, that in his efforts to approximate all heretics whatsoever to a model of “godly” and acceptable Protestant orthodoxy, Foxe deliberately suppressed or glossed over opinions that were beyond the pale as much in Protestant as in Catholic perception. Faced with confessions of gross errors in the doctrine of the Trinity by some of his Kentish martyrs, Foxe merely commented: “To these articles what their answers were likewise needeth here no great rehearsal. …” Some of this material survives in Foxe's papers not in the form of transcripts but in the very pages roughly torn from the original trial register of Archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield, effectively removing them from the public domain. Since the foliation is not continuous, it is just possible that other pages, more incriminating still, were actually destroyed, a capital offense for any historian to have committed.⁴⁵ We look forward to the shedding of further light on such matters in the critical edition of Foxe that Professor David Loades now has in hand, 150 years after that great Victorian editor, J. G. Nichols, first called for it.⁴⁶

III

With the literary studies made by Helen White and William Haller in the 1960s, and more recently by Warren Wooden and John Knott, interest has shifted from the scrutiny of Foxe's accuracy and reliability as a historian, on the narrow terms of the English empirical tradition, to appreciation of the rhetorical and literary accomplishments of Acts and Monuments, or to what Wooden calls Foxe's artistry.⁴⁷ The year 1963 was a landmark, for it witnessed the publication both of Helen White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs and Haller's famous study, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (published in the United States as The Elect Nation).⁴⁸

For Haller, the question was not whether Foxe told the truth as we would have it told, but what he took the truth to be and induced so many of his countrymen at such a critical moment to accept as such: “Whether the facts and the meaning of the facts were in every respect what he made them out to be, we need not inquire.”⁴⁹ Following Haller, and the important corrections in his reading of the text and understanding of its reception by Katherine Firth, Richard Bauckham, and V. Norskov Olsen, much attention has been concentrated on the apocalyptical and chronological framework of Acts and Monuments, together with cognate questions of ethnocentricity. Was it either Foxe's intention or the inadvertent effect of the book to create in what Foxe called “this my-country church of England” a Miltonic sense of manifest and unique destiny, of England as not only an elect nation but the elect nation of God?⁵⁰ That grand subject lies beyond the scope of this modest essay, with its more limited concern with truth, lies, and fiction.

By now we should be thoroughly sensitized to Foxe's literary strategy of validating the Protestant Church and its “true” faith in the patient yet triumphant witness of the martyrs. We now know that these martyrs of the Reformation were represented as not only successors but replications of the early Christian martyrs; that Latimer's ever memorable words to Ridley at the stake, “be of good comfort … and play the man,” were an echo of the heavenly words uttered to St. Polycarp as he entered the arena; that the martyred Bishop Hooper was modeled on that same Polycarp in many respects. That spirited, not to say alienated, gentlewoman Anne Askew, victim of a late Henrician episode of persecution, was presented (by John Bale in the first instance) as a kind of protomartyr of this latest age, the counterpart of Blandina, the second-century slave girl martyred in Lyon: a remarkable case not only of Reformation fashioning but of self-fashioning, since Askew herself prepared most of the materials out of which her legend was composed.⁵¹ Foxe himself was, as it were, a reincarnation of the martyrologist and inventor of ecclesiastical history, Eusebius of Caesarea.

The Eusebian quality of Foxe is particularly evident in the preface called “The Utility of This Story,” where the martyrologist contrasts the themes of secular historiography, “the roar of foughten fields, the sacking of cities, the hurlyburlies of realms and people,” with “the lives, acts, and doings, not of bloody warriors, but of mild and constant martyrs of Christ.” These martyrs, Foxe wrote “declare to the world what true Christian fortitude is, and what is the right way to conquer,” adding, “With this valiantness did that most mild Lamb, and invincible Lion of the tribe of Judah first of all go before us.”⁵² Eusebius must have been well known to Foxe before the publication of his first English edition in 1563. But in 1579 he was introduced to a wider audience in Meredith Hanmer's translation. Hanmer was an obscure and by no means respectable individual who can have been little more than a functionary in an enterprise guided by Foxe. The printer was the Huguenot Vautrollier, with whom Foxe and a small team of translators were working in the late seventies to produce a little library of works by Martin Luther in English.⁵³ Headed by Luther's lectures on Galatians, these books presented Luther at his most “comfortable,” and were perhaps intended as a prophylactic against the pastoral damage thought to be caused by Calvinism, of which Foxe, as a spiritual physician, had first-hand experience.⁵⁴ These were the only translations of Luther available to the English-speaking Protestant world for three hundred years to come.

There is no need to restate at any length the many valuable contributions made to our appreciation of Foxe's text by his modern literary critics, though it is worth mentioning John Knott's convincing argument that what distinguishes the Foxeian narrative from those of the early church martyrologists is the combative, contentious behavior of the Protestant martyrs as they confront their accusers and judges, contrasted with the more passive disposition of the primitive martyrs. Knott's explanation is contextual and circumstantial. Eusebius wrote in the secure enjoyment of the peace of the church, recording martyr victories that had achieved their earthly as well as heavenly vindication. Although there were parallels between the Constantinian peace and the Elizabethan settlement, which Foxe made something of, if only for courtesy's sake, the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, which Bale and Foxe constructed apocalyptically and cosmically as the war of the two churches, Christ and Antichrist, was still being fiercely fought, even as Foxe wrote. Even the English persecution was very recent, and some of the persecutors were still alive. So Askew was frankly presented as a resourceful debater and even a scold, not at all like Blandina, except that Blandina as depicted by Bale and Foxe was not a little like Askew.⁵⁵ Knott has shown how Foxe edited the account that the protomartyr John Rogers wrote of his own trial to heighten its polemical effect. If Rogers himself recorded not only what he said but what he would have liked to say, Foxe converted his words into what Foxe would have liked him to say, writing some of his lines for him.⁵⁶ Although these resourceful, aggressive courtroom performances were succeeded by the constrained passivity of the executions, Foxe's critics were given grounds on which to complain that his so-called martyrs were not in the least martyrlike in their behavior. Where was that humility that adorned the true martyr?

In what is left of my space, I shall first pick a couple of bones with literary scholarship and then consider some of the wider implications of what may be called the textualization of Foxe. We have hardly begun to come to terms with the great generic diversity of this huge, sprawling text, in Wooden's phrase “a medley of literary forms,” embracing comedic and romantic as well as annalistic elements, not to mention the Protestant recension of the medieval literary tradition of the ars moriendi, which is such a large part of its rationale, together with copious controversial polemic. Much work remains to be done. In Wooden's words, “modern critics have taken only the first harvest.”⁵⁷

Both of my bones concern miracles, matters of truth and fiction. An argument of Helen White, reinforced by John Knott, runs like this: When Foxe disavowed, as he did, the name of martyrologist, he was distancing himself from the hagiographical tradition enshrined in The Golden Legend, which had been published in English as recently as 1527. When he called himself a mere storyteller, he meant that he did not deal in legends. Helen White remarks that Foxe's book “is full of the contempt of the sixteenth-century Reformers for the miracle and the miracle-monger.” The miracles of Thomas Becket were “lying miracles,” “monkish miracles and gross fables.” Knott suggests that Foxe “minimizes the intrusion of the supernatural,” making his martyrs not saints but “models of Christian heroism,” manifesting the invincibility of true faith. They were “more closely connected to a sustaining human community, and more fully human” than the martyrs and saints of Catholicism.⁵⁸

This is helpful, but it undervalues the marvelous tokens and signs that Foxe occasionally reported, as it were in spite of himself, and that may well have held a more prominent place in popular Protestant memory and imagination than Foxe himself allowed. White acknowledges this: “Old habits die hard.” Wooden emphasizes that the final “tokens” of the truth and efficacy of the martyrs' faith, which abound in his set-piece scenes, were “a palpable substitute” for the fantastic and discredited miracles of The Golden Legend.⁵⁹ When Thomas Stapleton translated and published Bede's History of the Churche of Englande (1565), he defended the miraculous in the pages of Bede and asked why, if “straunge and uncredible miracles and visions” were inadmissible, there was so much material of this kind in Foxe. “Ar there not also in that donghell heaped a number of miserable miracles to sette forth the glory of their stinking martyrs?” “Iff the Crosse of saint Oswalde seme a superstitious tale, how much more fonde and fabulous is the tale of one that suffred at Bramford, with a greate white crosse, appearing in his brest?”⁶⁰

But there are miracles, and miracles. In his A fortresse of the faith (1565), Stapleton conceded that “as for the miracles of Fox in his Actes and monuments, his owne felowes esteme them but as civill thinges, and such as may happen by course of reason. And in dede they are no other, such of them as are true.”⁶¹ White and Knott rightly insist that the ability to withstand an excruciatingly painful and prolonged death was the real miracle, repeatedly witnessed in Foxe's pages. Were these “civil” things, subject to rational explanation and medical and psychological description, miracles only in the debased and commonplace sense in which we use the word today? Was the courage of the martyrs no more than a simple function of their humanity, albeit a redeemed and elevated humanity, of which any Christian was in principle capable?

We must be careful not to impose our modern way of seeing things on a writer of Foxe's generation. To represent the heroic endurance of his martyrs as a merely human achievement, with “no sense of being transformed by the presence of Christ,” secularizes and modernizes to excess. Although the miraculous in the perception of Protestants is no simple matter, it may be cautiously defined as occurrences within and not outside the course of nature (no talking heads or bleeding statues), but according to a causation not, on our terms, natural, “nature” being not the efficient, or sufficient, cause. When Foxe wrote of the preservation of the Princess Elizabeth during her sister's reign as “a singular miracle of God,” he meant just that. In the 1570 edition, the providential presentation of this story was accentuated by suitable marginal notes and running headlines, perhaps with the intention of admonishing both queen and reader. It was not Elizabeth's strength of character that had preserved her but God.⁶² Foxe's classical humanism may have disposed him to represent the deaths of his heroes as, at one level, human achievements. But they were achievements inconceivable without the power of a transcendent yet intrusive God, all of whose workings were marvelous.

To say so much and no more is to sell Foxe and his Protestant readers and their age short. After the account of Elizabeth's travails, Foxe entered what Annabel Patterson might want to call his anecdotage, as Acts and Monuments peters out in a catalogue of such particular providences as the loathsome, shameful deaths of the persecutors, in the manner of the De mortibus persecutorum of Lactantius, paired with the equally remarkable escapes and preservations of many of the godly. It would be hard indeed to exaggerate how all-pervasive is this kind of providentialism in the early modern mentality, not only before the Reformation but after it. To the modern mind, this may appear the ultimate and most comprehensive of superstitions.

Foxe's appendix of cautionary tales was not the end of a lingering and outmoded tradition, but rather the harbinger of a new wave of morally correct credulity, which for more than a century to come would be fostered by sensational broadsheets and pamphlets, and by such substantial and ambitious albums as Thomas Beard's Theatre of Gods Judgements (editions in 1597, 1612, 1631) and Samuel Clarke's Mirrour or looking-glasse both for saints, and sinners, held forth in some thousands of examples (1657). This material was so traditional in form, content, and moral values that it would not be appropriate to call it a literary genre peculiar or even proper to Protestantism. But it was manifestly compatible with a Protestant worldview, or theodicy. In Beard's stories (some of them centuries old), the earth opens up to swallow its blaspheming victims, Sabbath-breaking hunters father children with dogs' heads, and punishments fit the crime in bizarre ways that manipulate where they do not defy nature. Such tall stories claimed, of course, to be “true,” but in what sense or degree is a nice question.⁶³ Foxe is by comparison so restrained that the White-Knott argument threatens to reenter through the back door.

We return from the providential fantasies of God's violent theme park to Foxe's generally more believable stories. Did these things happen very much as Foxe describes them? This is my second bone to pick. Referring less to such improbable tales as the bull of Chipping Sodbury, which was the instrument of divine providence in goring to death a bishop's chancellor, and more to the edifying and apparently authentic scenes of the martyrdom of Rogers, Hooper, Ridley, Latimer, and quaint old Rawlins White: Were these narratives true? A no-nonsense historical positivist like Sir Geoffrey Elton had no doubt that they were. Foxe did not have to invent the persecutions.⁶⁴ (But something depends upon what one means by “invent.”) Curiously enough, modern literary scholarship, with which Elton tended to have no truck, seems to agree, perhaps because even so-called new historicists are ultimately indifferent to what actually happened in history. So Knott only once touches on the reliability of Foxe's narratives in this crucial respect. Commenting on the “apparent serenity” of John Rogers as he broke the ice, washing his hands in the flames “as one feeling no smart,” Knott remarks: “At least, this is Foxe's interpretation of the scene, one likely to have been shared by the committed Protestants in the crowd.”⁶⁵

But are we really to believe in such scenes as Foxe describes? It stretches our credulity and sensibility that such agonies could have been so stoically borne. The master of “sheer horror”⁶⁶ spares us none of the gory details: Ridley leaping about in a badly laid fire, shouting “I cannot burn”; Hooper reviving a poor fire with the fat dropping out of his fingers' ends; the young Dartford linen draper Christopher Wade holding out his extended arms as a sign, until he was “altogether roasted.”⁶⁷ If it really was so, then we may have to invoke something like Seymour Byman's rather shaky historical psychology, fitness training, as it were, in the disciplines of sustained asceticism (another paradox, for these were essentially Catholic disciplines).⁶⁸

On the whole, it may be safe to accept Foxe's word for it that these deaths were martyrlike. It is significant that when the Dutch Anabaptists were burned in Smithfield by the Elizabethan government (in spite of Foxe's pleas and protests), their deaths were observed to be not martyrlike. They died “in great horror with roaring and crieng.”⁶⁹ (But the recorded observations are hostile, and we do not know how an Anabaptist source might have represented these deaths.) Many in the crowds who attended the Marian burnings came expressly to observe the manner of the victims' deaths. For example, the seven thousand present at Bishop Hooper's execution, perhaps 15 percent of the population of Gloucestershire (it was market day, and the boughs of a great elm tree were “replenished with people”), were there “to see his behaviour towards death.”⁷⁰ The Catholic controversialist Miles Huggarde,⁷¹ as vivid a writer as Foxe himself, quoted against the incinerated Latimer Latimer's own words from an Edwardian sermon in which he had dismissed the suggestion that certain Anabaptists were true martyrs because they had gone to their deaths “interpid.” Intrepid let them go. Augustine had taught: “Martyrum non facit poena, sed causa.” Just so, said Huggarde. He scorned the “brainsick” fools who scrambled for bones and ashes to use as relics and miracle cures (were these the same people as Foxe's godly and restrained spectators?). But he never once suggested that the martyrs themselves were not “intrepid,” which surely he would have done if the testimony of thousands of still living observers had allowed him to.⁷² Only a tincture of doubt persists. In the early Elizabethan interlude New Custom, the vice character Cruelty exults with nostalgic glee as he remembers the burnings over which he had presided. In the fire, the victims had made a noise like a pack of hounds.⁷³ So we lily-livered moderns would be inclined to expect. Foxe supplies details of only a fraction of around three hundred burnings. Were some of the others deficient in martyrlike edification?

To conclude, in spite of that elusive fragment, that Foxe told it the way it was, is emphatically not to deny that the power of his narrative depended upon the manner in which he told it, upon style and artistry. On the contrary, in spite of Wooden's and Knott's valuable studies, we have only begun to explore the riches of the fictive constituents of Acts and Monuments. I can do little more than sketch out some of the lines of enquiry that merit more extensive investigation, such as recent studies, the new critical edition, and even these modest suggestions, may stimulate.

The point from which all such investigations must embark is the consideration that Sidney's distinction between the factual and the fictional, however useful for his rhetorical-polemical purpose, is unhelpful and even false, as Sidney himself admitted when he noted that historians had been glad to borrow both fashion and weight of poets. Judith Anderson, in her study of the representations of historical persons in Tudor literature, Biographical Truth, is struck by the convergence rather than the divorce of fiction and history in the texts she treats, fiction being defined not as pure nonfactual invention but as “the deliberate and creative shaping of fact.” Anderson quotes Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse: “Novelists might be dealing only with imaginary events whereas historians are dealing with real ones, but the process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into the comprehensible totality … is a poetic process.” “In every historical account of the world,” White continues, it matters little “whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined; the manner of making sense of it is the same.”⁷⁴ Wooden comments on Foxe's consciously artistic preference for the descriptive over the hortatory mode, which crowds his narratives with closely observed circumstantial detail. That such minute particulars were caught, that they actually existed, is trivial in comparison with the use to which they were put. Even where they held no emblematic significance (and often they did) circumstantial details lent the appearance of verisimilitude.⁷⁵

Some historians may by now be cross with me for making such large concessions to the textuality of both historical sources and historical compositions, as they would be downright angry with Roland Barthes for describing historical narratives as “verbal fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten.”⁷⁶ Having elsewhere attacked Natalie Davis's Fiction in the Archives (with some willful misunderstanding of her intentions), John Bossy writes in the preface to his enthralling Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair that it reads like a novel, but with this difference: that the events happened. He is a historian and historians tell true stories about the past.⁷⁷ For historians it must matter very much whether Foxe, who is our principal and often only source for much of what we know about the English Reformation, wrote true stories or not. If documents, many of them, have a certain textuality, historians need to know they can put their trust in texts as documents.

That being the case, Foxeian studies ought to address a formal question. Do all Foxe's stories enjoy, or even lay claim to, an equal status? Are they all meant to attract the same amount of credence? I would suggest not. In the main body of the text, consisting of great slabs of cumulative, chronological narrative, rolled along on their supporting documentation, Foxe expects and for the most part deserves to be believed. He is not inventing his material in the sense of making it up. But the tail end of the book consists of a kind of delta of wandering, inconsequential, anecdotal streams. These stories of divine judgment and mercy may be largely fictional and may have been so understood by both Foxe and his readers. The story of the bishop's chancellor and the bull was too good a story to omit for the trivial reason that in reality the chancellor lived on for many more years.⁷⁸ Other anecdotes, like the dreadful fate recorded of the twelve-year-old girl, a foolish maiden, who said that God was “an old doting fool,” were told as warning examples and exactly resemble the fabulous contents of Beard's Theatre, or the repertory of tales from medieval pulpits and florilegia that Beard appropriated.⁷⁹ It is not clear that John Myrc's congregations or Thomas Beard's readers believed or were expected to believe all these stories, or that they needed to in order to benefit from them. Wooden's comment that Foxe was “surely unwise” to accept some of the more dubious of his tall stories may underestimate his literary sophistication. Foxe could make use of a story of “incredible strangeness,” but only in what he calls “some out-corner of the book,” not in “the body of these Acts and Monuments.”⁸⁰

In Foxe's extended, fifteen-thousand word narrative of the miraculous preservation of Queen Elizabeth in her sister's reign,⁸¹ it is certain that some episodes were invented, or willfully falsified. For example, Foxe must have known that when Elizabeth was arrested at her house at Ashridge and taken to London and eventually to the Tower, she was first allowed to recuperate from an illness, and was not summarily removed “alive or dead,” as his account suggests. This freestanding piece is evidently not history in the same sense that the main body of the Book of Martyrs is history. What should we call it? I do not suppose that I shall be allowed to call it an early version of the novel.

Foxe's account of Princess Elizabeth's ordeal was the source for Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody and for other plays. And Shakespeare depended upon Foxe for a whole scene of his Henry VIII. So another fruitful line of enquiry will concern the question of theatricality, a question extending well beyond the use of theatrical metaphors, which are as common in Acts and Monuments as in Sir Thomas More.⁸² Foxe was himself a dramatist, author of an academic comedy, Titus et Gesippus, an ambitious apocalyptic drama, Christus Triumphans, and of other Latin plays no longer extant. Like his friend and mentor, John Bale, he believed in attacking popery with the full repertoire of the three Ps, which included not only preachers and printers, but players.⁸³

The trials and executions of heretics were carefully stage-managed affairs, a literally dramatic and richly ritualized demonstration of orthodoxy, which martyrs and martyrologists appropriated and inverted for their own equally dramatic and didactic purpose.⁸⁴ And if Foxe's conscious theatricality reflected the inherent theatricality of his material, the production of the text enhanced its dramatic status. Investigations of The Book of Martyrs as theater should not neglect those bibliographical insights that Don Mackenzie has characterized as “the sociology of texts,”⁸⁵ including the typographical layout of the page, and what may be inferred from the typography about the ways in which the text may have been read. We know that The Book of Martyrs was read “thoroughly,” which is to say, systematically, and that it was presumably read aloud, especially in godly Protestant houses. But that by no means exhausts the questions that may be asked about the manner of the reading. The nineteenth-century edition is useless when addressing this question. G. Townsend and S. R. Cattley do not tell us, for example, that in the 1570 edition, the speeches given to Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth in the encounter marking the climax of Foxe's account of Elizabeth's preservation are for the first time broken up into short paragraphs, one for each interlocutor, so presenting the visual representation of a play text.⁸⁶

The two-way traffic between Foxe's enormous tome and some of the more popular and ephemeral literature of the day, a somewhat incongruous relationship of elephant and gnat, deserves more attention than it has yet received. On the one hand, Acts and Monuments incorporates the texts of broadside ballads, such as “The Fantasie of Idolatry,” a song of fifty stanzas on the folly of going on pilgrimage (preserved by Foxe from oblivion), and the very popular “The Exhortacion of Robert Smith unto his Children,” a Marian prison ballad known by its composer as “Rogers Will.”⁸⁷ On the other, it includes a number of essentially Protestant and improving ballads derived from Foxe or from similar texts, such as Bale's account of Anne Askew or Coverdale's Letters of the Martyrs. These included The godly and virtuous song and ballad of John Careless, sung to the tune of “Greensleeves,” but also to a melody of its own called “The tune of John Carelesse,” evidently popular since in its turn it was appropriated for other purposes. In a little book published in 1577, “Rogers Will” was accompanied by ballads attributed to other Marian martyrs, including Bradford and Hooper, making what has been called by Tessa Watt “a miniature book of martyrs,” one both affordable and portable. “The most rare and excellent history of the Dutchesse of Suffolks calamity,” adapted from Foxe by Thomas Delony and set to the tune of “Queen Dido” (1602), was still in print in 1754.⁸⁸ The evidence of this material ought to be prescribed study for those historians who believe that Protestantism and popular culture were incompatible in 1754.

To appreciate Foxe as a living text that recorded performances and invited performance, and that fed on a popular Protestant culture and nourished it in return, is to point to yet another helpful approach, and one suggested both by Knott and by Richard Helgerson in his Forms of Nationhood.⁸⁹Acts and Monuments was both the product and the possession of a godly community, one of those “imagined communities” which, according to Benedict Anderson, include modern nations.⁹⁰ The “invisible church” of Foxe and other apocalyptic writers is just such an imagined community. Its members are readers who imagine themselves in invisible fellowship with thousands of other readers and, one may add, with generations of Christians no longer living. Foxe was, as it were, but the amanuensis of this godly community, which both constructed his book and was constructed by it. More materially, Foxe was, at least initially, but one member of a Protestant network actively committed to recovering and recording the history of the Marian persecution and the monuments of its martyrs, a collective that included Edmund Grindal, Miles Coverdale, Latimer's servant Augustine Bernher, and the neglected Henry Bull, Foxe's Magdalen contemporary, whose contribution to the preservation and editing of the all-important “Letters of the Martyrs” preserved, since the sixteenth century, in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was very considerable.⁹¹ And we should include in the joint authorship of The Book of Martyrs not only its star performers, the highly self-conscious writers of all those letters and examination transcripts—Rogers, Bradford, Careless, and Philpot—but the cast of thousands, that “godly multitude” in Smithfield and elsewhere that made the imagined myth of the godly community credible.

Foxe's pages are peopled by, on the one hand, large, undifferentiated, uniformly godly crowds, and on the other by remarkable and exemplary individuals, good and bad, called by Wooden “tent-post figures,” and the subject of extended biographical treatment.⁹² These elements are made to interact almost cinematically at the scenes of martyrdom. Thus Foxe sets the stage for the last of the Smithfield burnings: “It was appointed before of the godly there standing together, which was a great multitude, that so soon as the prisoners should be brought, they should go to embrace them and to comfort them; and so they did,” with “the godly multitude and congregation” making “a general sway toward the prisoners, meeting and embracing, and kissing them.”⁹³ As for the “tent-posts,” in spite of Judith Anderson's reservations about the formulaic and repetitive limitations of Foxe as biographer, it is precisely the conventions controlling his fashioning of the lives, personalities, and conduct in extremis of his martyrs that deserve scrutiny. Whether or not they really cracked jokes on their way to the fire, or fetched great leaps, or clapped their hands in the flames for sheer joy, it was necessary to include such details as manifestations of that apatheia which, in the Aristotelian ethical scheme, is true courage, a mean between cowardice and rash self-destruction.⁹⁴

Plutarch depended upon Aristotle, and Foxe was the Plutarch of the sixteenth century. Why has no one commented on the Plutarchan device of the double biography as deployed by Foxe in the most celebrated of all his scenes, the martyrdom of the two bishops, Ridley and Latimer? The point of the device is to employ contrast to illuminate the admirable qualities of two dissimilar individuals (or, in other circumstances and for other purposes, to prefer one to the other). Erasmus used it in his double portrait of John Colet and Jacques Vitrier.⁹⁵ So we are shown Ridley, in his handsome fur-trimmed gown and tippet, “such as he was wont to wear being bishop,” a man still physically and intellectually fit, his pockets full of valuable trifles to give away as keepsakes, his watch, his napkin, some nutmegs. And then we catch sight of Latimer, struggling along behind in his poor frieze coat all worn and his comical headgear, “which at first sight stirred men's hearts to rue upon them, beholding on the one side, the honour they sometimes had, and on the other, the calamity whereunto they were fallen.” And yet Latimer, who while still clothed appeared “a withered and crooked silly old man,” stripped to his shroud “stood bolt upright, as comely a father as one might lightly behold.”⁹⁶ We do not necessarily have to doubt the nutmegs or any other of these circumstantial details. Foxe's informant was probably Latimer's faithful servant Augustine Bernher,⁹⁷ who was certainly present and who lived on into the reign of Elizabeth to assist both Foxe and Coverdale with their martyrological labors.

It remains relevant that Foxe, in his carefully balanced presentation of this material, proves himself to be every bit as much a humanist, a product of the Renaissance, as he was a Protestant and a creator of the English Protestant tradition. More attention could well be paid to his Stoicism, which, more than any distinctly Christian ethic, may have sustained that unusual aversion to violence, which, Foxe wrote, made it hard for him to pass by the very slaughter yards without a sense of revulsion and pity for the poor beasts.⁹⁸ It may even have been Stoicism that made Foxe a martyrologist.

It mattered that Latimer should be presented as upright and comely, a wholesome old man. In one of his providential anecdotes, Foxe told of a man in a pub in Abingdon who boasted that he had seen “that ill favoured knave Latimer when he was burnt,” and that he had teeth like a horse. In that very hour, the man's son hanged himself, not far away.⁹⁹ Disgusting and shameful deaths, gross physical deformities, were reserved for the persecutors, and mainly for the clergy. (The lay officers in Foxe's perception were often only doing their job.) I do not think that we need to believe that Bishop Stephen Gardiner had toenails like claws, any more than that King Richard III was grossly deformed from birth.

All this fashioning, which was indeed a self-fashioning by and of the Protestant community through Foxe, was achieved by means of language. How the English Protestant community contrived within a very few years to invent its own demotic, a language of heightened emotion, warmth, fervent exhortation, and, above all, biblical resonance, is a question not only still to be answered but almost never put, except in a German work of the 1920s, Levin Schücking's The Puritan Family.¹⁰⁰ It is Foxe's rhetorical style that above all deserves the serious evaluative study it has never received, and that an earlier generation, C. S. Lewis to particularize, disparaged. In a chapter of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century called “Drab and Transitional Prose,” Lewis said of Foxe: “His English style has no high merits. The sentences have not the energy to support their great length.” Foxe was “an honest man” (as Cicero had written, “it is enough that the man should not be a liar”), but not “a great historian.”¹⁰¹ Warren Wooden helpfully adjudicates. Examples of the lumbering, tottering sentences Lewis describes are not hard to find in a work whose style is plastic rather than uniform. But neither is it difficult to discover sentences that are “spare, compact, and distinguished by highly functional syntax,” the work of “an impressive prose craftsman.”¹⁰²

Finally, we return to the matter of truth. Insofar as Foxe is to be charged with falsifying on a large and general scale, then it was his language that did the falsifying, and altogether insidiously. Language turned into sweet societies of faithful favorers—into innocent lambs of Christ, decorous and dignified, loving and meek—men and women who in reality were creatures of passion as well as of flesh and blood, whose street language, when Foxe happened to catch the ipsissima verba, was robust and abrasive.¹⁰³ And yet what a fictive triumph it amounts to! Lewis's judgment can no longer be sustained. We cannot better the verdict of Helen White: “Foxe proves himself a storyteller of quite remarkable power, one of the greatest of a great age.”¹⁰⁴

Notes

1. Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale, Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976), especially page 119; Glanmor Williams, Reformation Views of Church History (London, 1970), 62.

2. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. G. Townsend and S. R. Cattley (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, vol. 1, 1841, vols. 2-4, 1837, vols. 5-7, 1838, vol. 8, 1839), 4:295.

3. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or the Defence of Poesy, ed. G. Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), 105-12. For an excellent discussion of the issues traversed by Sidney, but more subtly by a number of other sixteenth-century authors, see William Nelson, Fact or Fiction, the Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 49-55.

4. Cicero De oratore 2.13.62.

5. William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Virtuous Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England, ed. and abr. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 4-5.

6. Sidney, Apology, 97, 105.

7. The First and Second Parts of John Hayward's The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, ed. John J. Manning, Camden 4th ser. 42 (London, 1991), 63.

8. Cited in 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), 4-5.

9. Sidney, Apology, 107, 109-11.

10. See Professor Joseph Levine's essay elsewhere in this volume; and Alistair Foxe, “Thomas More and Tudor Historiography: The History of King Richard III,” in Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 108-27.

11. Sidney, Apology, 97. William Nelson comments on “two conflicting attitudes: on the one hand, the insistence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition on veritable reports, testified to as by witnesses in a courtroom; on the other, a sense that in tales of the past truth mattered little in comparison with edification or even entertainment.” Fact or Fiction, 27.

12. Cicero De oratore 2.14.62.

13. The passage from Becon refers to Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, ed. J. Ayre, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 604. Michael McKeon draws attention to a passage in Foxe in which “the two kinds of truth” are “suddenly severed”: “To express every minute of matter in every story occurent, what story-writer in all the world is able to perform it?” Foxe insisted that he had better and higher things to do. The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 93; citing Acts and Monuments of Foxe.

14. Marion True et al., The Getty Kouros Colloquium Athens, 25-27 May 1992 (Malibu, 1993); reviewed, Times Literary Supplement, 22 October 1993. On Sidney's defensive attitude toward “poor Poetry,” see Apology, 95-6 and passim; and on its implications, see Nelson, Fact or Fiction.

15. The “epistemological stance” of ballad texts, in which “strange but true” almost becomes “strange, therefore true,” is discussed in McKeon, Origins, 46-8. See also Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 47-56.

16. Joseph Mede's news letters are in British Library, MSS Harleian 389, 390, the remark about “our Speculatives” occurring on fol. 277r of Harl. 390. John Rastell's A. C Mery Talys (1526) includes (sigs. Dii-Diiv) the story of the Warwickshire preacher who told his auditory: “Yf you beleue me not, then for a more suerte & suffycyent auctoryte, go your way to Coventre, and there ye shall se them all played in Corpus Cristi playe.” Preaching in Cambridge in 1627, Thomas Edwards, the future author of Gangraena, affirmed: “If all this be not true, then this book (clapping his hand upon the holy Bible) is full of falshoods, and God himself is a lyar, and Christ himselfe a deceiver”; Cambridge University Transactions During the Puritan Controversies of the 15th and 17th Centuries, ed. J. Heywood and T. Wright (London, 1854), 2:362. Both preachers were in breach of pulpit decorum. For Glibery's preaching, see Public Record Office, S.P. 12/159/27. He is called “a verie ridiculous preacher” in the Puritan survey of the ministry in Essex, The Seconde Parte of a Register, ed. Albert Peel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 2.163. Glibery finished up in the pages of Martin Marprelate and may have given us our word “glib.” See my essay, “Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Satire and the Construction of Puritanism,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 150-70. On the Bible as “the touchstone by which all other tales of the past must be tested,” see Nelson, Fact or Fiction, 20-1.

17. See, for example, Christopher Middleton, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England, with his strange adventures for the love of Celestina daughter to Lewis King of Fraunce (1597), ed. W. E. Mead, Early English Text Society, o.s. 165 (1925). Michael McKeon points out that as late as the late seventeenth century, not even in the catalogs of the book trade was any clear distinction drawn between (on our terms) “history” and fiction, “another sort of Historyes which are called Romances.” However, in this state of “generic chaos,” typical of Renaissance literary culture, the distinction was perfectly accessible and just as often made. McKeon, Origins, 26-8.

18. “Next unto the holie scripture, chronicles do carry credit.” Raphael Holinshed, The firste volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577), 766.

19. The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, ed. R. S. Sylvester, Early English Text Society, 243 (1959), 4, 183-6. Judith H. Anderson comments: “The meaning of truth alters and evolves in this biography.” Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 27-39.

20. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 8:164-6. See also Patrick Collinson, “Truth and Legend: The Veracity of Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” in Clio's Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands 8, ed. A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (Zutphen, Netherlands: De Walburg Pers, 1985), 44; reprinted in Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambeldon Press, 1994), 169.

21. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

22. Woolf, The Idea of History, 35.

23. William Camden, Britain (London, 1610), 6-8.

24. Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion: Or a chorographical description of Great Britain … digested in a poem (London, 1613-22).

25. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 1:272; cited in John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 42.

26. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 1:504, 514.

27. Both passages from Latimer refer to Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 487. Stapleton's remark appears in the epistle introducing his translation of The History of the Church of England Compiled by the Venerable Bede (Antwerp, 1565). Cited hereafter as Stapleton, epistle.

28. The Works of John Jewel, ed. J. Ayre 4, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1850), 1167.

29. See also Patrick Collinson, “Thomas Cranmer,” in The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. G. Rowell (Wantage: Icon Press, 1992), 79-103.

30. John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 138-60, and passim.

31. Cited ibid., 141.

32. On the use to which some of Foxe's illustrations were put, as well as cheaper products that were a spin-off from Foxe, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 90-1, 94, 147, 158-9, 223-4. The revisionists' opponents referred to include A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation rev. ed. (London: Batsford, 1989); the revisionists themselves, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

33. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 1: 502-3; Collinson, “Truth and Legend,” 31; and Stapleton, epistle.

34. I am not sure whether Professor A. G. Dickens ever committed that statement to print, but I have heard him make it verbally more than once.

35. See Susan Wabuda, “Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies: Studies in Church History, vol. 30, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), 256-7.

36. BL, MS Harl. 420, no. 12, fols. 80-178.

37. An epistle wrytten by John Scory the late bishop of Chichester … unto all the faythfull that be in pryson in Englande (“Southwark,” recte Emden, 1555), sig. A3.

38. Richard Prat to John Foxe, 20 January 1560, BL, MS Harl. 416, fol. 176.

39. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:4-9.

40. For Foxe's excuse, see ibid., 21. For Parkhurst's incompetence and its consequences, see The Letter Book of John Parkhurst Bishop of Norwich Compiled During the Years 1571-5, ed. R. A. Houlbrooke, Norfolk Record Society, 42 (Norwich, 1975); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500-1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 184-7; and Felicity Heal, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 251-2. Foxe's East Anglian connections, especially in the 1560s, make it likely that he had Parkhurst in mind.

41. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:26.

42. Ibid., 28-33.

43. Ibid., 550.

44. Ibid., 33.

45. Ibid., 8:326, 300. See also 254. See Collinson, “Truth and Legend,” 41-4.

46. Nichols drew attention to the need for a scholarly edition of Foxe in editing Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, Chiefly from the Manuscripts of John Foxe the Martyrologist, Camden Series, o.s. 77 (London, 1859). The British Academy is currently funding a “Foxe's Book of Martyrs Project” under the guidance of Professor Loades. In an appendix to his John Foxe (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983), 117-19, Warren W. Wooden compares the accounts of a particular episode in the 1563, 1583, and Victorian editions of Acts and Monuments, illustrating both the need for such an enterprise and the difficulty that it will inevitably entail.

47. Wooden, John Foxe, 76.

48. Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963); and The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963).

49. Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 15, 187.

50. Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford, Abingdon: Sutton Courteney Press, 1978); Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530-1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).

51. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:550. See Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 99-101; and John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 207-11.

52. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 1:521-3.

53. The Hanmer translation is The auncient ecclesiasticall histories wrytten by Eusebius, Socrates, and Euagrius (London, 1577, 1577, entered with the Stationers, 1579). For Meredith Hanmer's distinctly spotty reputation, see Dictionary of National Biography. The Vautrollier Luther translations (original editions) are Short-Title Catalogue nos. 16965, 16975, 16989, and 16993. See G. R. Elton, “Luther in England,” in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4:230-45.

54. Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England told the story of the Kentish matriarch Mrs. Mary Honywood who suffered from a chronic religious melancholy of the kind for which Calvinism has often been blamed. She told Foxe that she was as sure to be damned as the glass that she hurled to the floor was to be broken. But then there happened a wonder. The glass rebounded entire. Fuller, The Worthies of England, ed. J. Freeman (London, 1952), 273-4.

55. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 57-8.

56. Ibid., 11-32.

57. Wooden, John Foxe, 115.

58. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, 164-7; Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 33-46.

59. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, 164; Wooden, John Foxe, 45-6.

60. Stapleton, epistle, fols. 8v-9r.

61. Thomas Stapleton, A fortresse of the faith (Antwerp, 1565), fol. 99v.

62. I am indebted to the study of this text made by Damian Nussbaum as a bibliographical exercise for the M.Phil. degree in medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, and to discussions with Mr. Nussbaum. See also his M.Phil. dissertation, “Foxe's Acts and Monuments: Development and Influence. Dramatising Contests and Contesting Dramas: The Ritual and Representation of Tudor Heresy Executions,” 1993.

63. These suggestions draw freely on Alexandra Walsham's Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, “Aspects of Providentialism in Early Modern England” (1995) and especially on her chapter on Thomas Beard. See also Peter Lake, “Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism, and Murder in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994), 257-83.

64. G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 386.

65. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 12.

66. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, 160-2.

67. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:551 (Ridley), 6:658 (Hooper), 7:319-21 (Wade).

68. Seymour Byman, “Ritualistic Acts and Compulsive Behaviour: The Pattern of Tudor Martyrdom,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 625-43; and Byman, “Suicide and Alienation: Martyrdom in Tudor England,” Psychoanalytical Review 61 (1974): 355-73. Warren Wooden is another student of Foxe who has drawn attention to the painful physical tests to which the martyrs subjected themselves, experimenting with their capacity to bear the pain. John Foxe, 44-5.

69. John Stow, The Annales of England (London, 1592), 1162. Walter Strickland reported to Edward Bacon that they “died stubernly and nether patiently nor martir like.” Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.d.568. In the next century, the Leveler Richard Overton would ask: “Who writ the Histories of the Anabaptists but their Enemies?” Cited in McKeon, Origins, 77. However, note also the manner of the death of the radical Arian heretic Francis Kett, who was burned at Norwich on 14 January 1589. The Norwich minister William Burton reported that “he went leaping and dancing: being in the fire, above twenty times together, clapping his hands, he cried nothing but blessed be God … and so continued untill the fire had consumed all his neather partes, and untill he was stifled with the smoke.” Cited in Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Kett. The future Bishop Joseph Hall wrote to a Norfolk recusant about the joyful death of a priest, Robert Drewrie, executed at Tyburn on 26 February 1607: “How many malefactors have we known that have laughed upon their executioners, and jested away their last wind! You might know. It is not long since our Norfolk Arian leaped at his stake.” Cited in F. L. Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 1574-1656: A Biographical and Critical Study (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1979), 66.

70. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 6:650.

71. See Joseph Martin, “Miles Hogarde: Artisan and Aspiring Author in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Religious Radicals in Tudor England (London: Hambeldon Press, 1989), 83-105.

72. Miles Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestants (London, 1556), fols. 36-7, 41.

73. The passage, from A new enterlude No lesse wittie: then pleasant, entituled new Custome (London, 1573), is worth quoting in full:

    CRUELTIE:

    By the masse there is one thing makes me laugh hartely ha, ha, ha

    AVARICE:

    I pray thee what is that?

    CRUELTIE:

    What? ha, ha, ha, I can not tel for laughing

    I would never better pastime desier

    Then to here a dosen of them howling together in the fier

    Whose noyse as my thinketh I could be compare:

    To a crie of houndes folowing after the Hare.

    Or a rablement of Bandogges barking at a Bear,

    ha, ha, ha.

    The copy in the Huntington Library bears the (spurious?) signature of “Wm Shakespeare.”

74. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 97-8, and chapter 3, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” passim; Anderson, Biographical Truth, 1-5. Anderson excludes Acts and Monuments from her Biographical Truth on the surprising and hardly necessary ground that Foxe's lives are “formulaic and repetitive.” “Foxe's book is not about men but about martyrs.” In a sense, the subject is not mankind but the Holy Spirit. Anderson, Biographical Truth, 2, 3.

75. Wooden, John Foxe, 71-75.

76. Roland Barthes, “Historical Discourse,” in Structuralism: A Reader, ed. Michael Lane (London: Penguin Books, 1970), cited in Keith Thomas, History and Literature: The Ernest Hughes Memorial Lecture 1988 (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1988), 23.

77. John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 1-2. Bossy's attack on Natalie Zemon Davis's Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Telling in Sixteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1989.

78. J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (London: SPCK, 1940), 164.

79. According to Foxe, these stories tell of “The severe punishment of God upon the persecutors of his people and enemies to his word, with such, also, as have been blasphemers, contemners, and mockers of his religion.” Acts and Monuments of Foxe (London, 1839), 8:628. The lamentable story of the twelve-year-old “wench,” Denis Benfield of Walthamstow, supplied to Foxe by William Maldon and his wife, occurs at 8:640.

80. Wooden, John Foxe, 23; McKeon, Origins, 92.

81. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 8:600-25.

82. Nussbaum, “Dramatising Contests and Contesting Dramas.”

83. Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation (Reading, England: Reading University, 1986), 15; Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988), 103, 114. See also Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage and Playing in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), passim.

84. See David Nicholls, “The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation,” Past and Present 121 (1988): 49-73; and Nussbaum, “Dramatising Contests and Contesting Dramas.”

85. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1986 (London: British Library, 1986).

86. I owe this information to Damian Nussbaum.

87. Collinson, Birthpangs, 106; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1563), sigs. 3U2-3U2v.

88. Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia, 17, 17 n. 67, 35; Tessa Watt, “Piety in the Pedlar's Pack: Continuity and Change, 1578 to 1630,” in The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725, ed. Margaret Spufford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 100-1, 95, 317-18; 91-4.

89. Knott, “The Holy Community,” chap. 3 in Discourses of Martyrdom; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 265-6.

90. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, refers to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

91. See Wabuda, “Henry Bull.” Coverdale's Certain most godly letters (London, 1564) was more properly the work of Bull.

92. Wooden, John Foxe, 51-2.

93. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 8:559.

94. See Collinson, “Truth and Legend,” 48.

95. Erasmus to Jodocus Jonas, 13 June 1521, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. and H. M. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906-58), no. 1211, 4:502-27. An English translation is in Desiderius Erasmus: Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 164-91. See Jessica Martin, “Izaak Walton and his Precursors: A Literary Study of the Emergence of the Ecclesiastical Life,” Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1993, 78-85; and Dr. Martin's forthcoming monograph on the same subject.

96. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:547-9.

97. I owe this suggestion to Dr. Susan Wabuda.

98. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book, 86-7.

99. Acts and Monuments of Foxe, 7:547-9.

100. Levin L. Schücking, The Puritan Family: A Social Study from Literary Sources, trans. Brian Battershaw (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

101. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 299-301.

102. Wooden, John Foxe, 62-4, 76.

103. Collinson, “Truth and Legend,” 48-50.

104. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, 160.

Among the many scholars who have helped me in my limited understanding of John Foxe and the related matters discussed in this essay, I should like to single out Damian Nussbaum and Alexandra Walsham.