Their product was a single volume book, a bit over a foot long, two palms-span wide, too deep or thick to lift with only one hand given it exceeded 1500 pages, and weighing about the same as a small infant.

Volume II is an "Ecclesiastical History conteyning the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs" [capitalized in original] and offers "a general discourse of these latter persecutions, horrible troubles and tumults styred up by Romish ['Roman' in 1563] Prelates in the Church".

We find the lying Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, with large wooden prints of men and women, encompassed with faggots and flames in every leaf of them, chained to the desks of many county churches, whilst abridgements of this inflammatory work are annually issued from the London press under the title of The Book of Martyrs.

[g] It then dealt with the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, during which the dispute with Rome had led to the separation of the English Church from papal authority and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer.

The 1632 edition added a topical outline and chronology, along with a "continuation of the foreign martyrs; additions of like persecutions in these later times" which included the Spanish invasion (1588), and the Gunpowder Plot (1605).

Actes and Monuments survived whole primarily within academic circles, with remnants only of the original text appearing in abridgments, generically called The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe.

[3] Titled Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happening in the Church : with an vniuersall historie of the same ... Foxe began his work in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI.

In 1554, in exile, Foxe published in Latin at Strasbourg a foreshadowing of his major work, emphasizing the persecution of the English Lollards during the fifteenth century; and he began to collect materials to continue his story to his own day.

Foxe published the version in Latin at Basel in August 1559, lacking sources, with the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs as[disputed (for: conflict with the 1559 text)  – discuss] "no more than a fragment.

[29][38][39] The full title is Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romish prelates, specially in this realm of England and Scotland, from the year of our Lord 1000 unto the time now present; gathered and collected according to the true copies and writings certificatory, as well of the parties themselves that suffered, as also out of the bishops' registers, which were the doers thereof; by John Foxe.

[45] The fourth edition, published in 1583, the last in Foxe's lifetime, had larger type and better paper and consisted of "two volumes of about two thousand folio pages in double columns."

[49] Issued with a dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham, Timothy Bright's tight summary of Acts and Monuments headed a succession of hundreds of editions of texts based on Foxe's work, whose editors were more selective in their reading.

[52] Nineteenth-century professionalizing scholars, who wanted to distinguish the academically significant Acts and Monuments from the derived "vulgar corruption", dismissed these later editions as expressing "narrowly evangelical Protestant piety" and as nationalistic tools produced only "to club Catholics".

[11th ed.,volume 10, p.770]"; two years later in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Francis Fortescue Urquhart wrote of the value of the documentary content and eyewitness reports, but claimed that Foxe "sometimes dishonestly mutilates his documents and is quite untrustworthy in his treatment of evidence".

Mozley in summary concerning Foxe's Book of Martyrs states the following: "It is indeed prolix [i.e. long-winded], unsystematic, carelessly edited, one-sided, oversharp, sometimes credulous.

He did not hold to later centuries' notions of neutrality or objectivity, but 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.

"[66] In their 1952 British Authors before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, Kunitz and Haycraft wrote, "For a century at least it was practically required reading in every English-speaking Puritan household, often the only book owned except the Bible.

Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells a side of the story which must be heard, but his text should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."

[citation needed] It could be simply deleted as an error, but it repeats and elaborates William Haller's second thesis as if a fact, that the later Foxe-derived abridgements had lost entirely intellect's levening influence.

A scan of the titles for Foxe-derived editions make the claim unlikely, and Reflexive Foxe: The 'Book of Martyrs' Transformed, prove it false; findings supported by Haller and Wooden's less comprehensive glimpses into the later abridgments.

Samuel Roffey Maitland,[29][30] Richard Frederick Littledale as well as Robert Parsons and John Milner, mounted campaigns to disprove Foxe's findings.

"[73] John Milner, defender of the "old religion" (Catholicism), authored several tracts, pamphlets, essays, and Letters to the Editor: "Dear Sir…"; using all public means available to him for declaring that abuse of Englishmen was occurring "frequently", ipso edem, the defamation and harassment of Catholics in England – a treatment not similarly visited on Sectarian communities or the Quakers.

[61] Anglicans consider Foxe's book a witness to the sufferings of faithful Protestants at the hands of anti-Protestant Catholic authorities and their endurance unto death, seen as a component of English identity.

[78][79] Following a 1571 Convocation order, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals, select churches, and even several bishops' and guild halls.

Acts and Monuments sailed with England's gentleman pirates, encouraged the soldiers in Oliver Cromwell's army, and decorated the halls at Oxford and Cambridge.

Haller means by this, "the view of history advanced by propaganda in support of the national settlement in church and state under Elizabeth, kept going by the increasing reaction against the politics of her successors, and revived with great effect by the puritan opposition to Anglican prelacy in the Long Parliament.

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.

This text, its dozens of textual alterations (Foxe's Book of Martyrs in many forms), and their scholarly interpretations, helped to frame English consciousness (national, religious and historical), for over four hundred years.

"[82] Patrick Collinson confirmed that Foxe was indeed a worthy scholar and that his text was historiographically reliable in 1985, and set in process the British Academy's funding for a new critical edition in 1984, completed by 2007.

[96][97][98][99][100] Patrick Collinson concluded at the third Foxe Congress (Ohio, 1999) that as a result of the "death of the author" and necessary accommodations to the "postmodern morass" (as he termed it then), The Acts and Monuments "is no longer a book [in any conventional sense.