Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

Chapter 4- Moving Pictures: Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding

82 Chapter  Moving Pictures Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding Margaret Aston In the history of printing, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or “Book of Martyrs” has come to seem more important than ever during the quarter century since the appearance of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (PPAC). As understanding of the relationships between script and print, texts and readers, word and image has increasingly engaged our attention, Foxe’s great work is telling us more and more. Eisenstein was pointing the way toward future fields of study when she wrote about the ability of “ordinary men and women to participate vicariously” in the great epic of Foxe’s Protestant martyrology, and the “new interplay between pictures and words.” What follows amounts to a footnote exemplification of her remark that “relationships between text and illustration, verbal description and image were subject to complex transpositions and disruptions.” The focus here is on an illustration in a great book of conjoined texts and images, which was designed to make its impact through deliberate artful transposition. The great book in question is one of the large biblical concordances produced by the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. By the mid 1630s the small family community established by Nicholas Ferrar in the Huntingdonshire countryside had gained fame not only as a religious retreat but also for its book production. If in some quarters the following of a religious regime, even of so informal and domestic a kind, seemed to reek of old monasticism, others , including Charles I, who visited Little Gidding in 1642, some nine years after his first contact with the community, was evidently sympathetic to the I am very grateful for the generous help I have received from Trevor Cooper, Tom Freeman, and Joyce Ransome. . PPAC, 258, 260, 423. See also p. 415 on Foxe’s title page and Protestants with books on their laps, and p. 423 n. 399 on “the outpouring of tracts contributing to a new Protestant martyrology which culminated in Foxe’s successive editions.” Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding 83 spirituality of this place of Christian work and prayer, as well as admiring of its books. The daily services of the family group (which included three generations) were—like the books they made—closely scriptural, and their routine was structured to provide time and space for the work of the Concordance Room and, from 1631 on, for dialogue and debate in their Little Academy. The participants in these discussions, which aimed to amuse as well as improve the community as a whole, were given names that reflected their character or standing, such as the Chief, Mother and Guardian, the Cheerfull, Affectionate and Patient, thereby inculcating a degree of formality, as well as moral intent. The large volumes of gospel harmonies so laboriously created at Little Gidding were a new form of handmade book, which combined printed letter-face and engraving to produce texts with extraordinary trompe l’oeil effect. This unique hybrid perhaps still awaits its due in the history of bookmaking. That it had any connection with Foxe’s celebrated work has not hitherto been suspected. Foxe was no stranger in that community. Indeed, the hostile pamphlet The Arminian Nunnery, which attacked the community so venomously in 1641, paid what amounted to a backhanded compliment to the influence of Foxe’s work by alleging that “for another shew that they [the ‘fond and fantasticall Family of Farrars’ ] would not bee accounted Popish, they have gotten the Booke of Martyrs in the Chappell; but few or none are suffered to read therein, but onely it is there (I say) kept for a shew.” This was in fact about as far from the truth as it was possible to be. Quite apart from English Protestant credentials at large, the Ferrar community had a strong and specific bonding to the Acts and Monuments. The founder’s upbringing and innate convictions were grounded in reading “the Lives of all the Holy men of old time, and Saynts of God, the good Fathers of the Church, and of those good Men, in our later times, even in the Church of England, the Saynts and Holy Martyrs.” Nicholas Ferrar’s mother ensured that her children were brought up in her own fullness of “love to God’s word” through daily scripture reading and psalm singing, and according to her son John...