Replies

Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius, Bede, Matthew Paris, and many others; and his accounts of these early events were no more accurate than his sources.
Foxe’s great contribution, however, was his compilation of the English martyrs from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources of all kinds to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses, a remarkable range of sources for English historical writing of the period.[20]
Nevertheless, Foxe often treated this material casually, and any reader “must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies.”[21] Furthermore, Foxe did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity. He made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as “Mark the apish pageants of these popelings” and “This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing.”[22]
The material contained in the work is generally accurate, although selectively presented. Sometimes he copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. Although both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe presented “lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger.”[23] Foxe’s method of using his sources “proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth.”[24]
[edit]Evaluation and perspectives

For the English Church, Foxe’s book remains a fundamental witness to the sufferings of faithful Christians at the hands of the anti-Protestant Roman Catholic authorities and to the miracle of their endurance unto death, sustained and comforted by the faith to which they bore living witness as martyrs. Foxe emphasizes the right of English people to hear or read the Holy Scripture in their own language and receive its message directly rather than as mediated through a priesthood. The valour of the martyrs in the face of persecution became a component of English identity.
Foxe is more accurate when dealing with events during his own time, and his book is in no sense an impartial account of the period. Yet, although the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica accused Foxe of “wilful falsification of evidence,” J. F. Mozley maintains that Foxe preserves a high standard of honesty; and the 2009 Encyclopædia Britannica notes that Foxe’s work is “factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere.”[25]
Roman Catholics consider Foxe a significant source of English anti-Catholicism, charging among other objections to the work, that the treatment of martyrdoms under Mary ignores contemporary mingling of political and religious motives—for instance, ignoring the possibility that some victims may have intrigued to remove Mary from the throne.[26] In fact, as David Loades has noted, Foxe’s history of the political situation is “remarkably objective. He makes no attempt to make martyrs out of Wyatt and his followers, or anyone else who was executed for treason, except George Eagles, who he describes as falsely accused.”[27]
[edit]Later influence

Dual martyrdom by burning, 1558; from a 1641 edition of Foxe.
After Foxe’s death, the Acts and Monuments continued to be published and appreciatively read. John Burrow refers to it as, after the Bible, “the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period.” [28]
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only “the most sensational episodes of torture and death” thus giving to Foxe’s work “a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author’s intention.”[29] Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church Anglicanism, the book’s credibility was challenged in the early nineteenth century by a number of authors, most importantly, Samuel R. Maitland.[30] In the words of one Catholic Victorian, after Maitland’s critique, “no one with any literary pretensions...ventured to quote Foxe as an authority.”[31]
The publication of J. F. Mozley’s biography of Foxe in 1940 reflected a change in perspective that reevaluated Foxe’s work and “initiated a rehabilitation of Foxe as a historian which has continued to this day.”[32] Recently, renewed interest in Foxe as a seminal figure in early modern studies created a demand for a new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition.
In the words of Thomas S. Freeman, one of the most important living Foxe scholars, “current scholarship has formed a more complex and nuanced estimate of the accuracy of Acts and Monuments....Perhaps [Foxe] may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind.”[33]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxe’s_Book_of_Martyrs
[edit]See also