John Foxe and the overload of books

John Foxe must have been asked why his Book of Martyrs was necessary or needed when he was writing it in the early 1560s.  He seems to have feared that another book of History lacked readers as his audience was already overwhelmed by books.  In his final preface to the first edition he reflects on those concerns.  Foxe makes a declaration intended to prove the utility and profit of yet another history book, especially one so large.  He notes that there are an infinite multitude of books ‘daily put forth everywhere’, many of which were to be regarded as superfluous and only made to pester the circumspect reader. 

Part of the problem lay in Foxe’s own doubts about his ability (although these were often rhetorical words and should, perhaps, not be taken literally).  Foxe described how difficult it was to write something ‘singular’ that could join ‘thinges’ together (i.e. various histories and events) and provide something of use to the reader (‘increase the industry of the learners, the utility of the studious, and the delight of the learned’).  Foxe’s defense was the one that he purported throughout his prefaces and the book itself:        

“I thought it not to be neglected, that the precious monuments of so many matters, and men most meet to be recorded and registered in books, should lie buried by my fault in the pit of oblivion” (A&M, 1563,A declaration concerning the ultility and profit of this history)

The concern was a simple one.  Although they would not have admitted it, the reformers were partly to blame for the scattering of England’s manuscript heritage upon the purging of monasteries in the 1530s.  Little had been done since to recover those texts – many of which were unique and irreplaceable.  

Furthermore, the story of History told from generation to generation did not any longer fit the needs and requirements of a Protestant Church of England.  That story claimed conversion to Christianity by the Pope’s hand.  It argued for allegiance to Rome and the denouncement of any and all attempts to criticise that relationship. 

Protestants, like Foxe, needed to retell the past in their own image.  But, crucially, that retelling had thus far been piecemeal.  Foxe mentions that ‘the number of trifling pamphlets may grow out of remembrance’.  It was certainly a concern.  Campaigns to bring over opinions can be won through bombardment of pamphlets and other writings, but these are a weak bridge, with little concrete foundation, stability or persistence.  What was needed was a central resource from which those other works could be divulged.  Foxe wanted to provide that foundation; a large work, containing all that was necessary: in essence the Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs that he was producing. 

Foxe called it his duty and considering the interest and patronage given to him by the likes of Sir William Cecil, Archbishop Matthew Parker, and Edmund Grindal, then Archbishop of York; it most probably wasn’t an exaggeration, even if that was not quite what he meant.  Previous to Foxe’s publication there were indeed a multitude of shorter texts published regarding the martyrs so recently burnt at the stake. 

In 1559 Thomas Brice had published a poem which listed the Marian martyrs in order of the dates of their executions.  The same year John Day printed The complaynt of veritie, made by Iohn Bradford, a short treatise that transcribed the martyrs writings.  It was the first of many.  In 1560 William Powell printed A frutefull treatise and full of heauenly consolation against the feare of death. Whereunto are annexed certaine sweete meditations of the kingdom of Christ ... Gathered by that holy marter of God, John Bradford.  Bradford’s writings and examinations were also printed by William Griffith and William Copeland in 1561 as well as by Rowland Hall in 1562. 

For other martyrs, Thomas Marsh published Arthur Golding’s A briefe treatise concerning the burnynge of Bucer and Phagius, at Cambrydge, in the tyme of Quene Mary.  Also in 1559, Henry Sutton had printed The examination of the constante martir of Christ, Iohn Philpot.  In 1562 Henry Bull had published An apologye made by the reuerende father and constante Martyr of Christe John Hooper (1562).  In this text Bull noted that ‘manye frutefull workes did they [the Marian martyrs] write in prison…but fewe are come to lighte’.  A year after the Acts and Monuments had seen print, Bull published the writings of Miles Coverdale as yet another example.  Foxe also added to this growing collection with his Friendly Farewell, a collection of the writings of Nicholas Ridley.

It is probably these tracts that Foxe was referring to when he stated that he didn’t want to overload people with yet another book on the subject.  His argument was that his book would be the last word on the subject; a synthesis of the other tracts in one big volume.  In this, at least Foxe succeeded.  Other than subsequent editions of his own book, there were relatively few other publications focused on martyrs after 1563.  The Acts and Monuments had smothered all competition, and it had done so extremely well.   

The Battle of the Books: A seventeenth century war of words and ideas



In preparing for my paper for the Anglo-American conference in July, I thought it would be worthwhile looking at the seventeenth century debate of the same name as the conference: the Battle between the Ancients and the Moderns.  Although such a title sounds more like a plot from a Hollywood film, the reality is somewhat dryer, though, perhaps, more intellectually satisfying.  I think what grabbed me most about that debate was something that Joseph M. Levine wrote in his 1981 article ‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered’: 

“the ancients were not simply defenders of tradition against the new, they had in fact come onto the European scene in England as elsewhere as innovators, humanists, in revolt against the culture of their own (late medieval) times.  Thus, paradoxically, an ancient could in certain circumstances appear to be a modern, as we shall see the moderns, more closely examined, could sometimes turn out to be ancients.  In the battle of the books the ancients were the self-conscious continuators of the Renaissance and were determined like their predecessors to exalt and to imitate the past – but not any past and certainly not that medieval past which was to them all Gothic and barbarous – rather that special corner of the past which they demarked as classical antiquity and to which they attached a peculiarly practical value.” 

-          Joseph M. Levine (p. 78)



Woodcut from Jonathan Swift's
Battle of the Books (1704) which
vividly discussed the contention
between 'Moderns' and 'Ancients'

It is certainly true that many learned men who wrote in the final decades of the sixteenth century saw themselves as humanist scholars.  It is also true that all of them, pretty much without exception, looked back to classical authors to support their arguments.  For those who wrote histories it was to the likes of Livy that they turned to in their prefaces to exclaim truth, honesty and approval.  Religion, which of course was at the height of contention in this century, had already become a scholarly battleground where the veracity of which doctrine was correct largely rested upon dim recollections and fragmentary evidence of a mythical pristine early church.  Did the true church lie with the Pope and the Roman Catholics, or, as the Elizabethan regime in England argued, did it lie elsewhere, in a church that has ever since its inception, been a persecuted church?  The answer did not lie in what we would now call the medieval period, although some, like John Foxe, did make strenuous use of that period of time.  The truth, they believed lay in the times of the ancients. 

Nevertheless Foxe’s focus on the medieval centuries as well as the ancient Roman times may well have incidentally helped to pave the way for seventeenth century scholars to make their debate upon those seeking knowledge from the ancients and those seeing knowledge as yet to be discovered.  Rosemond Tuve, for example noted in 1939 how the vernacular, and in particular the re-discovery of Old English, helped to shape the quarrel between ancients and moderns:

“The commonplaces of the position taken by the Moderns against the pretended decay of Nature are belief in the superiority of a Christian culture, in the progressive unveiling of Truth, defence of the indigenous and English as against the classical Ancient, confidence in the improvements of Modern knowledge and the methods of critical scholarship, and a constantly growing faith in the almost infinite possibilities opened up by these new approaches and concepts.  ‘Saxonist’ endeavours established connection with these modern axioms at almost all points”

-          Rosemond Tuve, (p. 178)

Saxon study therefore provided the Moderns with a non-Latin heritage and enabled them to distance themselves from the pagan learning’s of the ancients through the means of language and religious culture.  A more recent study by Wyman H. Heredeen on the early seventeenth-century scholar William Camden makes use of a similar argument:

“With new theories about language and education, as well as with the intensification of nationalistic sentiment across Europe, a new Hellenism emerged that recognized that the ancients were once the moderns, that the true spirit of classical writers was to be found in the cultivation of the vernacular.  The price of the success, or partial success, of the humanist’s educational agenda, then, was being superseded by a Hellenism less dependent on narrowly defined ideas of imitation.”

-          Wyman H. Herendeen (p. 110)

Two divergent viewpoints had therefore emerged.  The first was the very same that Foxe had believed in his own century; that all truth and knowledge could be found through study of the classical past.  His use of the medieval was largely to show how the papacy and Christian culture in general had fallen from that initial purity over many centuries.  The rise of humanist learning and a reformed religion was therefore necessary to put the human race back on track.  Half a century later however, the seeds sown by Foxe and his colleagues in the study of the Anglo-Saxons as well as in later medieval history to show that decline, were re-identified as a method for breaking away from the classical inheritance.     

 

Further Reading

Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A life in context (2007).

Joseph M. Levine, ‘Ancients and Moderns Reconsidered’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15:1 (Autumn 1981), pp. 72-89.     

Rosemond Tuve, ‘Ancients, Moderns and Saxons’, English Literary History 6:3 (Sept. 1939), pp. 165-190.

Ancient and Early Modern Martyrs: A Reformation reappraisal of Britain’s Roman heritage as told by John Foxe (Abstract)

The Anglo-American conference on Ancients and Moderns is now just over 2 months away and the research for my paper is, annoyingly, still only slowly ebbing along.  Nevertheless I hope to be able to start talking a little more about my thoughts and findings on this blog over the next few weeks.  In the meantime I thought I would share with you the abstract for my paper:      

Ancient and Early Modern Martyrs: A Reformation reappraisal of Britain’s Roman heritage as told by John Foxe

The Acts and Monuments, written by John Foxe in the late sixteenth century, is commonly recognised as primarily a martyrology that vividly details the persecution of English Protestants by the government of Queen Mary.  However, the work is so much more than this; it is an ecclesiastical history that told a revised history of Christianity from Christ through to their own times.  In this history the Pope was labelled as Antichrist and traditionally perceived heretics counted as members of the true faithful. 

Foxe chose many ways to establish his argument and to validate his claims one of which was to show the authenticity of the protestant church to have stretched back to Christ himself.  In his second edition (published in 1570) Foxe devoted an entire chapter to the classical world seeking to show Roman culture, politics and religion through revised eyes.  Foxe wished to receive the classical world as a purer time not yet disfigured by human and supernatural corruptions but one also plagued by persecution.  For Foxe the true Christian church was a persecuted one as history had shown time and time again.   

Foxe achieved this aim largely through the eyes of Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263-339 AD) who had initiated the very form that Foxe wrote - the ecclesiastical history - but he also did so through the parallel researches carried out by other evangelical reformers such as the bibliophile John Bale and the German team of historians who compiled the Magdeburg Centuries.  Those texts were written in Latin so Foxe’s vernacular work provided for the ordinary English people the only accessible means to reformist re-evaluation of the classical world.  I will look at exactly what that interpretation was; how it related to the views of Foxe’s sixteenth century contemporaries; and how the classical world formed an essential role in Foxe’s understanding of the past and his conception for the present and future.  

Ancient or Modern religion? - Foxe's opening gambit

How did Foxe receive the classical traditions and texts?  How did he incorporate them into a revised conception of the past?  Was he unique in his vision of ancient civilization or did he agree with other scholars of his generation?  These are questions that need answering, and will have to become a focus for my study over the coming months.  Last weekend I made a start to these proceedings by reading through the first part of the first book of the Acts and Monuments.  In this section Foxe compared (in list format) the Roman Catholic Church of the sixteenth century with that described by Eusebius and others for early Christianity.  Foxe’s central purpose was to demonstrate that although the ancient church fathers had declared the Roman Church a true church, it was not right to claim that this was still true in the sixteenth century.  As Foxe himself notes:       

“What say they [that is the Roman Catholics], where was this Church of yours, before these fifty years?  To whom briefly to answer, first we demand what they mean by this, which they call our Church?  If they mean the ordinance and institution of doctrine and Sacraments, now received of us, and differing from the Church of Rome, we affirm and say, that our church was, when this church of theirs was not yet hatched out of the shell, nor did yet ever see any light: that is, in the time of the Apostles, in the primitive age, in the time of Gregory I and the old Roman Church” 

- A&M, 1583, bk. 1, pp. 25-26

As beginnings go this is a strong start for Foxe as it attacks head-on a central and popular Catholic argument: where was your church before Luther?  Foxe’s answer is a simple one: where was your church?

Ancients and Moderns: How to fit John Foxe into the picture?

Last week the Institute of Historical Research announced the programme for their 81^st Anglo-American Conference of Historians.  This year the topic is on Ancients and Moderns.  What do they mean by this?  Well the primary question for the conference is how does the classical world resonate in our own times?  In line with that question is how successive ‘epochs’ since the Renaissance have pictured themselves in relation to ancient civilizations? 

Logo for the 81s Anglo-American Conference of Historians
hosted by the Institute of Historical Research

There are many ways to answer and look at those questions one of which is to turn to the revision of history produced in the sixteenth century.  This is exactly what I plan to do in my paper for the Anglo-American conference.  The paper entitled Ancient and Early Modern Martyrs: A Reformation reappraisal of Britain’s Roman heritage as told by John Foxe will look primarily at the history of the Roman period in the Acts and Monuments and what this tells us about Foxe’s view of his own times.

The entire first book of the Acts and Monuments was dedicated to early Christian and Roman history with Eusebius’ account of early martyrs utilized by Foxe as a parallel to Protestants martyred under Queen Mary.  Eusebius of Caesarea (c. AD 263 – 339) wrote the first ever ecclesiastical history in the fourth century and Foxe located his work in the same tradition.  In this, Foxe was the first in England to follow Eusebius’ lead since the Venerable Bede but he was not the only one to do so in Christendom in the late sixteenth-century.  A German reformer named Matthias Flacius was also heavily involved in a collaborative project based in the city state of Magdeburg.  This project, basing itself upon Eusebius’ church history, resulted in fourteen volumes charting Christian history from the birth of Christ right through to the thirteenth century.  It was to prove a valuable inspiration and source for Foxe’s English-centric project. 

Eusebius of Caesarea (AD 263-339)

The return to Eusebius by protestant reformers both in terms of content and in form had specific resonances for a revised history of Christianity, especially one based upon the idea of the true faithful as a persecuted people as Foxe’s was.  Thus far there have only been a handful of studies on the Eusebius question and the Roman period in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and only two published:

• Minton, Gretchen E., '"The Same Cause and Like Quarell" : Eusebius, John Foxe, and the Evolution of Ecclesiastical History', Church History, 71:4 (2002), 715-42 .
• Freeman, Thomas S., Great Searching out of Bookes and Autors: John Foxe as an Ecclesiastical Historian, unpublished Ph.D (New Brunswick, The State University of New Jersey, 1995).
• Pucci, Michael S., ‘Reforming Roman Emperors: John Foxe’s characterisation of Constantine in the Acts and Monuments’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 29-51.  

The John Foxe project offers some additional research in its commentaries although these are preliminary in nature and, I should confess, were partly written by myself, and therefore represent my own limited investigations into this area thus far.  Included amongst these commentaries is the fact that Foxe, like all humanist scholars of his age, followed Cicero’s leges historiae – i.e. that the first priority was truth.  Foxe uses Cicero’s ‘laws’ not only to justify his own text but to derogatorily claim medieval chroniclers as having failed to attain the aspiration of Cicero (see commentary for 1583, bk. 1, p. 24).  Another commentary remarks upon Foxe’s overriding prophetic framework based loosely upon that of John Bale’s Image of Bothe Churches (1545).  Foxe structured his account of early martyrs via Eusebius but also through the lens of ‘two kingdom’ theory (the idea that there were a distinction between the affairs of this world and the kingdom of Christ) and the second of the visible and invisible church (see commentary for 1583, bk. 1, p. 53).  For the account of the ten persecutions we know that Foxe relied heavily upon the German ecclesiastical history, the commonly named Magdeburg Centuries that I mentioned earlier, and a handful of other sources including, presumably, a copy of Eusebius’ ecclesiastical history.  However, as discussed in the commentary for 1583, bk. 1, p. 57 investigations into this portion of Foxe’s book remains at a preliminary stage.  It is therefore these ten persecutions that I will be most interested in looking at for my paper. 

Fact and Fiction in sixteenth century history and the rise of the historical novel

The Musketeers 

Over the last few months I have been preoccupied with investigating the history of historical fiction and its relationship to academic history for the recent IHR winter conference: Novel Approaches: From academic history to historical fiction.  The results of this investigation now form a series of blog posts on the IHR Digital blog and have also been attached to the virtual conference website that I helped to develop.  Although this is somewhat of a diversion from my own research interests (and expertise) my examination into historical fiction from the seventeenth century right through to the present does nevertheless have a resonance with my studies of sixteenth century scholars.

The historical novel developed first in France in the seventeenth century as an alternative representation of the historiographical debates over Particular and Secret histories as opposed to the more traditional universal histories.  Particular and Secret history is, in essence, a focus on individual empowerment and its role in historical causation.  The arguments suggested that historical events were caused or given form through the peculiarities of the individuals involved.  In the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott (often claimed as the first historical novelist of modern form) drew out in his Waverley novels the historiographical debates of his time over nationhood and historical difference.  In the second half of the twentieth century the rise of postmodernism as a significant force in philosophical theory drove historians to debate whether all history was indeed historical fiction or historical truth.  The nature of ‘truths’ about the past was put under the microscope and many historians to this day conceive of the past as holding many truths and representations including the fictional.  

Back in the sixteenth century however, fiction and fact were often interchangeable.  One only has to look as far as John Foxe’s narratives and imagery of the Marian burnings to see how the two meshed together to form a truth about the past.  King N. King has written a fascinating account on the ‘literary aspects’ in the Acts and Monuments arguing that:

‘English Protestants of the early modern era readily understood that stories about the pain and suffering of martyrs provided exciting reading that afforded both edification and enjoyment’.

Foxe includes many fictional (and widely-known fictional) pieces in his Acts and Monuments.  The distinction for him was not whether or not these represented authentic historical evidence but whether they were rightly used or abused.  For instance the tales of saints in the hagiographical Golden Legend are vilified by Foxe as full of falsities and lies whilst the account of Jack Upland – which Foxe and others believed had been written by Geoffrey Chaucer – told a tale against friars and were therefore considered truthful in representing the beliefs and thoughts of a past society.

The Holinshed Chronicles produced largely as a collaborative project a short time after Foxe further supports the argument that literary elements were considered equally as valuable as historical fact.  Annabel Patterson has argued that:

‘They also had at their disposal a number of literary techniques and genres, which enliven and intensify the text they were constructing out of extremely diverse materials, but they did not make the mistake of some modern theoreticians in confusing literary methods with an endless, indiscriminate textuality’ (Patterson, p. 55)

In Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles Patterson added that sixteenth century chroniclers:

 ‘were convinced that what we call “literature” was integral to the cultural history they were compiling, an indispensable part of the record, both of the individual career and of the bildungsroman of the nation as a whole.’ (Patterson, p. 55)

Let’s deconstruct that a little.  First what is bildungsroman?  According to the Oxford English Dictionary bildungsroman means ‘a novel dealing with one person’s formative years or spiritual education’.  It is a coming of age story or educational tale depicting the psychological and moral growth of a protagonist from youth to adulthood.  Patterson’s use of the term here is to suggest that Holinshed’s chronicles were forging a tale of England’s growth from childhood (medieval) to adulthood (early modern).  Patterson is also highlighting the cultural aspects of Holinshed’s chronicle.  This was not just a political record or exegesis as chronicles had been in the past; Holinshed was forging a concept of England as a nation. 

In the sixteenth century fiction and fact were often interchangeable and both were set to work towards the common goal of achieving a particular truth about the past but not necessarily concerned with the truth as we would accept it today.   History, in the sixteenth century often focused on past perceptions as well as fact and the dividing line between the two was not always clear-cut.   

Further Reading

John N. King, ‘Literary Aspects of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’,John Foxe Online (2004). 

Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994)

For my ‘history of historical fiction’ blog posts see the IHR Digital Blog or for a pdf copy and an index to the blog posts visit the A History of Historical Fiction post on the Novel Approaches website.  In addition the site contains a wonderful collection of podcasted lectures, book reviews (including one by myself on John Arden's Books of Bale novel), articles, and bibliographies.    

The John Foxe Project

The Book of Martyrs (or by its original name the Acts and Monuments) represented a memorial and record of the Marian persecution of Protestants in the 1550s. Its author John Foxe forever etched into the English psyche the idea of “Bloody Mary” but he did so much more. This was an ecclesiastical history that claimed to reveal the falsities of the Roman Catholic Church and of England’s traditional history. Foxe revised that history to fit a protestant viewpoint and helped to set English historiography onto a path that we continue to follow in some form today.

For over 20 years The John Foxe Project (now renamed TAMO - The Acts and Monuments Online) has tirelessly worked to bring the Acts and Monuments into the digital age at first as a CD-Rom and then as a searchable website. The final instance of this website was published earlier this year and allows researchers, for the first time ever, to easily access all four editions of the Acts and Monuments in their entirety that were published in Foxe’s lifetime. Along with various essays, bibliographies and apparatuses this resource provides new scope for studies of Foxe, the English reformation, English writing of history, and much else besides.


Links
My post about this project on the IHR Digital blog

University of Sheffield Project Press Release

The use of sources

Annabel Patterson,
Reading Holinshed's
Chronicles (1994)

Over the last month or so I have been reading Annabel Patterson's 1994 book Reading Holinshed's Chronicles.  Here is the first of several thoughts I have on the subjects that she brings up. 

In her chapter on Protocols Patterson discusses the multivocality in Holinshed in some detail.  The marginalia contained notes to sources where relevant although these were far from complete.  Holinshed himself noted that he had ‘rather chosen to shew the diversitie’ of opinion among those sources that he relied upon rather than ‘by over-ruling them…to frame them to agree to [his] liking’ (Patterson, p.35).  Patterson notes that other histories written in the sixteenth century (such as that by Hall, Grafton and More) gave lip service to referencing sources although the re-issue of Fabian’s chronicles in 1559 did contain additional marginalia that noted the original source material.  Perhaps, then the protocol of noting sources in the margins was beginning to take shape as early as the 1550s.  Certainly John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, added copious marginalia noting his sources although these were often far from an accurate guide to what he had actually used.  For instance, many if not all his references to the Venerable Bede derived from other sources (prominently John Bale’s recent catalogue of English writers) and not from a copy of Bede at all.  In my researches on Foxe I could find no evidence that he had ever actually read Bede’s ecclesiastical history for himself. 

What is interesting about this marginalia (beyond the fact that it helps us to identify the sources that were used to compile the accounts in Holinshed and Foxe) is the reason for their inclusion.  As stated above, Holinshed had chosen to show the diversity of opinion in his sources.  The printer who had re-issued Fabian claimed a similar reasoning as to show ‘the diversities’ of Fabian’s sources.  Foxe made similar claims.  One of Patterson’s central arguments in her Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles focuses on the role of censorship in the writing of the chronicles.  In relation to the noting of sources, Patterson recognises that these marginalia might, in part, provide protection from censorship or rebuke as the words are clearly labelled as that of another.  However, Patterson is right to argue also that there was more to it than that. 

John Foxe often added marginalia to prove that he was telling the truth.  It was rare that Foxe would change an account taken from an original document.  What he would do instead is twist the meaning of that account by taking it out of context or ignoring other information contained in the source that was less useful to his argument.  He did this under the belief that the old chroniclers had been corrupted by the antichrist and had therefore written only a partially true account themselves.  Foxe therefore saw himself as doing a service by shifting the truth from the false.  So for Foxe sources were referenced to deepen the truth-claims that he was making.  What he wrote was not his own opinion but that of past writers (Catholic monks at that) who could not entirely suppress the truth. 

In Holinshed and Foxe sources were also noted so that the author could challenge their authenticity or even (in some cases) interact with that source.  Patterson has noted the inclusion of ‘I’ in various passages of Holinshed’s chronicles where the author has argued his opinion against that of the original source (Patterson, p. 36-7).  Indeed, Patterson shows that Foxes’ Acts and Monuments were used as a counter-balance to Holinshed and his successors in the accounts of Edward VI and Mary Tudor.  Holinshed intended for a more neutral stance on religion whilst Foxe obviously focused on his protestant revision of the past.  A comparison of Holinshed and Foxe is therefore interesting as opposing histories of their own period. 

In the Acts and Monuments Foxe used a similar strategy when dealing with Polydore Vergil’s history.  Vergil was viewed by Foxe as the most recent in a line of Popish writers whose goal was to distort the truth and destroy evidence that did not support the Roman Catholic position.  Indeed Foxe and others charged Vergil with the destruction of manuscript sources (a charge that was made somewhat ridiculous as it had been a partially protestant act that had destroyed the monastic libraries and thus hundreds of old manuscripts).  In the Acts and Monuments Foxe often noted Polydore Vergil in the margins in comparison to other older sources to show how distorted history had been written by Vergil.  Any error or uncertainty in Vergil was abused to its fullest in Foxe’s revisions.    

All of this suggests that sources were noted in sixteenth century histories (especially near the end of the century) as a means to defend and strengthen truth-claims, to protect against censorship or claims of heresy and treason.   Although sources were noted to allow others to find their base material this was not the priority and only served the purpose of making it more difficult for opposing historians to attack their truth-claims.  The reason for this evolution in historiographical practice I think must derive in part from increased debate and disagreement between historians over the authenticity of past accounts (made more essential due to the opposing sides of the reformation), the increased availability of accounts made possible from the expansion of the printing press as a medium of distribution, and from humanist as opposed to scholastic methods of looking at texts. 

PhD Thesis: Rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’: John Foxe and the Collaborative Reformation of England’s Past

Front Page from the first edition of the
Acts and Monuments (1563) taken
from The Acts and Monuments Online

My intention today is not so-much to promote my own work, but to state where I am coming from in terms of my own academic background.  The most important element of this is my doctoral thesis which focused on the research and writing by John Foxe and his colleagues to re-appropriate English history in a protestant mould.  John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is the largest evangelical text produced during the sixteenth century reformation in England.  Its main purpose was to promote the reformist agenda at court and to the English population at large. 

Although (from its inception) the Acts and Monuments has been best regarded as a martyrology and memorial for those protestants who were burnt at the stake during the reign of Mary I, it is in actuality an ecclesiastical history which traces the Christian church from its foundations to Foxe’s present day.  It is this element that I studied at the University of Sheffield between 2005 and 2009. 

My thesis focused on Foxe’s attempts to rectifying the ‘ignoraunce of history’ (his words) held by the English people.  In particular, it looked at Foxe’s writing of medieval history from the arrival of the Anglo Saxons through to the thirteenth century.  I attempted (where possible) to track down Foxes’ sources which were sometimes manuscript or printed copies of medieval chronicles, recent publications such as histories, polemics, catalogues, or treatises, or occasionally based upon official documents searched out in archives.  I also tried to trace Foxes’ contacts: names such as John Bale, Matthew Parker, John Day, Edmund Grindal and many more came up time and again and to varying degrees. 

The context in which Foxe wrote brought my attention to the wider international reformation with connections found between Foxe and the Magdeburg Centuriators of Germany (another gigantic ecclesiastical history project from this period) and various continental scholars.  However, the main basis for my work was the identification of source material that Foxe used and the way that he used it – not to tell lies or falsify as some have claimed in the past, but to tell a specific version of the past based upon what is said in his sources (and what Foxe believed was not said in his sources). 

So that is where I am coming from.  A study of how Foxe and others compiled the medieval portion of the Acts and Monuments.  My studies are now shifting towards a wider investigation of sixteenth century scholars and historians but also towards that moment of transformation which occurred during the reign of Mary I.  Exile not only radicalised many scholars from England in the 1550s but it also set English scholarship on a slightly different path – one that showed itself quite clearly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.