Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (review)

Reading John N. King's latest book was, to this reviewer at least, rather like walking through an old house that has been gradually extended and rebuilt over the centuries. One strolls through, observing the portions of older buildings that have been incorporated, sometimes on a wholesale basis, into the newer one. In King's book one easily perceives, for example, that much of the section on illustrations is derived from Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, or that the discussion of abridgements of the Acts and Monuments repeats what has already been said by David Kastan and Damian Nussbaum. Apart from one section (on the dissemination of the Acts and Monuments) there is little in the book that has not been already said by modern scholars. In and of itself this is not necessarily a fault; scholarship on John Foxe has exploded in the past two decades and much of the cutting-edge work on it has been published across scattered journals. It is therefore potentially useful to have a work that synthesizes these writings and presents them to the reader in a coherent and well-organized fashion. Moreover, an attempt to relate the Acts and Monuments to recent work in the burgeoning field of the history of the book is potentially constructive and timely.

However, there are several features of this book that undermine its value. A fundamental one is King's failure to supply references for many of his factual assertions. For example, King claims that John Bale, the antiquarian and polemicist, on his return from his first exile established a bookshop near St Paul's cathedral. This is fascinating if true, but there is no way to investigate the claim because King does not supply a reference. We are told that 'One Robert Lampkin, Jr., donated a copy of the fifth edition to North Creake parish, Norfolk, in 1597' (p. 274) without a reference being provided. Occasionally references are not given even for direct quotations: 'The church wardens' account at Holy Trinity Church in Milton Regis parish, Kent, records a 30 June 1708 payment to "Mr. lance for to pay Mr. Nath: Sackette for a book of martyrs and monuments of the church in 3 volumes in folio, lettered on the cover of each volume as per bill, £3 3s. 0d."' (p. 276). King does not explain whether he derived this reference from the original or from a secondary source.

Unfortunately when King does supply references they are often flatly erroneous. For example, he claims that a 'first-person transcription of [John] Rogers's heresy examinations survives in fragmentary form among the compiler's [Foxe's] papers' (p. 52). King provides this with a note reading 'MS Harley 421, no. 20'. However, this document is complete and not a fragment, and it is not an account, in the first person or otherwise, of Rogers's heresy examinations, but rather a copy of Rogers's excommunication, pronounced by Stephen Gardiner on 27 January 1555. 'No. 20', which replaces the folio number, is the number assigned to this document in the catalogue of Harley manuscripts published in 1808. Why cite a work to which relatively few people have access instead of giving the folio numbers?

Furthermore, the accuracy of King's quotations matches that of his citations. He declares that William Prynne claimed, in Canterbury's Doom, that Archbishop Laud 'called for the removal from churches of chained copies of the Book of Martyrs' (p. 151). Actually, all that Prynne said was that Laud refused to allow the Acts and Monuments to be reprinted. King also claims that 'as late as the 1920s a few tattered copies of the Book of Martyrs survived in situ at churches in London, such as St Andrew's Undershaft, Chelsea Old Church and St Clement's Eastcheap, where a copy was still chained to a lectern' (p. 276). King cites R. A. Rye's handbook on London...