Acts and Monuments

Foxe was an English Protestant who went abroad after Mary I came to the throne and returned under Elizabeth I. The first English edition was printed in London by John Day in 1563, and Foxe enlarged and corrected it three times before his death in 1587. From the second edition the work begins with the early church, but its weight lies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and above all in the reign of Mary.

For those years Foxe worked from material close to the events: the registers of bishops, the letters and examinations of the accused, and the accounts of witnesses, many of which he printed. The book is therefore a primary source for what the condemned said and wrote, and for much of it the only one. It is also a work with a cause. Foxe wrote to show that those who were burned belonged to the true church and that their judges did not, and he chose, cut and arranged his material to that end. Later editions differ from the first in substance, so a citation should say which edition it follows. For the centuries before his own Foxe depends on earlier chroniclers.