The Reformation

Abstract

In 1563 John Foxe, an English Protestant preacher, published The Acts and Monuments, a highly influential work which soon became known as The Book of Martyrs. It was one of the first histories of the English Reformation — the sixteenth-century political and religious crisis, in which Henry VIII and his successors broke away from the international Roman Catholic Church and established a national Protestant Church of England. John Foxe’s book tells a compelling story, of oppression by the corrupt medieval Catholic Church, of resistance by heroic Protestant martyrs, and of the mounting strength of a powerful Protestant movement in England. It ends with the momentous victory of Protestantism in 1559, when the great English Reformation vanquished ancient superstition and the English people enthusiastically embraced the Protestant religion — or that, at least, was how John Foxe saw it. And, partly through the influence of Foxe, that was how later generations of English men and women have seen it. The Foxe version came to dominate our understanding of a key period in our past.¹