Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is a book by John Foxe, first published in 1563. John Foxe’s sprawling work, originally titled Actes and Monuments, is a monumental piece of Protestant martyrology that documents the sufferings of religious dissenters from the medieval period through the Reformation, with a strong focus on England and Scotland. Written in the aftermath of religious upheaval, the book combines eyewitness accounts, official records, and polemical narrative to argue that Protestant faith represented a true, continuous witness against perceived abuses by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Its dramatic stories of persecution, executions, and courage were widely read and circulated, and the volume’s lengthy eyewitness material made it a powerful piece of popular and ecclesiastical propaganda in its own day. The work’s influence extended far beyond its first readers: it helped shape English Protestant identity, informed pulpit rhetoric and popular memory, and was long used as a reference for sermons, broadsheets, and local histories. The book remains a vital source for early modern historians because it preserves many contemporary documents and personal testimonies otherwise lost. For readers interested in the English Reformation, martyrology, church history, or primary-source accounts of religious conflict, this work remains indispensable despite — and because of — its partisan vantage point. This ebook is taken from a nineteenth-century edition.