The Actes and Monuments (full title: Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church), popularly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, is a work of Protestant history and martyrology by Protestant English historian John Foxe, first published in 1563 by John Day.
It includes a polemical account of the sufferings of Protestants under the Catholic Church, with particular emphasis on England and Scotland. The book was highly influential in those countries and helped shape lasting popular notions of Catholicism there.
The book went through four editions in Foxe’s lifetime and a number of later editions and abridgements, including some that specifically reduced the text to a Book of Martyrs.
The book was produced and illustrated with over sixty distinctive woodcut impressions and was to that time the largest publishing project ever undertaken in England. (Common descriptions in this paragraph and next: King 2006, Evenden & Freeman 2011, Mosley 1940, Haller 1963, Wooden 1983, White 1963). 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.[c]
Actes and Monuments for almost all its existence has popularly been called the Book of Martyrs. The linking of titles is an expected norm for introducing John Foxe’s sixteenth century work. William Haller (1963) observed that “[Bishop] Edmund Grindal called it a book of martyrs, and the name stuck.”[d] It may have contained Grindal’s “book of English martyrs” (as he had conceived the project), but it was not John Foxe’s.[13][14] Dismayed by the popular misconception, Foxe tried to correct the error in the second edition. That his appeal was ineffective in his own time is not surprising; very few people would even have read it. Continuing this practice in academic analyses is being questioned, particularly in light of Foxe’s explicit denial.