1570-Foxe's Book of Martyrs-Folio-John Fryth of the Sacrament-Henry the 8th-Rare

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For Buy it Now: A  rare 2nd Edition-1570 Leaf from Acts and Monuments or Foxes Book of Martyrs-

 This  Leaf  includes information concerning the Martyr-John Fryth. He was a friend of the great Christian-William Tyndale. See info below.

During the Reign of King Henry the 8th-July 1533

 

Printed in the Acts and Monuments 1570  London-2nd Edition- .

 Folio-14 1/2" by 9 1/2"  from Foxe's Book of Martyrs-The Actes and Monuments-2 Column text with Black letter.

 Leaf is numbered 1175/1176 during the year 1533.  Many notes and information added in Roman Font.

Condition- Nice Full Leaf -some browning-spot or two-small stain Inside edge a little rough.  

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Will come with nice COA and a copy of the title page-453 years old!!!!!

John Frith (martyr)

John Frith (1503 – 4 July 1533) was an English Protestant priest, writer, and martyr .

Frith was an important contributor to the Christian debate on persecution and toleration in favour of the principle of religious toleration . He was 'perhaps the first to echo in England' of that 'more liberal tradition' of Zwingli , Melanchthon and Bucer .[1] As his ministry progressed, Frith took greater risks with his stance against the Roman Catholic teachings of Purgatory and Transubstantiation . He was eventually brought before Thomas Cranmer and the Inquisition for his teachings and condemned to be burned at the stake for heresy .

In his revision of Foxe's Book of Martyrs , author Harold Chadwick writes the following about John Frith: "Master Frith was a young man noted for his godliness, intelligence, and knowledge. In the secular world, he could have risen to any height he wished, but he chose, instead, to serve the Church and work for the benefit of others and not himself."[2] During his studies, he became acquainted with William Tyndale who deeply influenced Frith's beliefs. Like Tyndale and Luther , Frith played an influential role in the Protestant Reformation .

Early life and education

John Frith (John Fryth) was born in 1503 in Westerham , Kent, England to Richard Frith the innkeeper of White Horse Inn (now known as Church Gate House.)[3] The house still stands at the gates of the Westerham Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin . His name is recorded in the baptism registry of St Mary's Church in 1503.[4] Though much of the church has been renovated several times over the centuries, the original 14th-century font in which Frith was baptised is still used today.[4] The John Fryth Room was added in the 1960s as a meeting room and there is a stone commemorative plaque in the church surrounds.[5] [6] The extended church choir are known as The John Fryth Singers.[7]

He went to Sevenoaks Grammar School . He was further educated at Eton College before being admitted as a scholar to Queens' College, Cambridge , although he received his Bachelor of Arts degree as a member of King's .[3] [8] While Frith was at Cambridge, his tutor was Stephen Gardiner , who would later take part in condemning him to death. He became proficient in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics.[9]

He also met Thomas Bilney a graduate student of Trinity Hall, and began to have meetings concerning the Protestant Reformation . It may have been at one of these meetings that Frith met with William Tyndale .[10] After graduating in 1525, Frith became a junior canon at Thomas Wolsey 's Cardinal College, Oxford . While in Oxford, Frith was imprisoned, along with nine others, in a cellar where fish was stored,[9] due to his possession of what the University's officers considered "heretical" books. Frith was released and fled England, joining Tyndale who was then residing in Antwerp .[3]

Residence in continental Europe

In 1528 he went to Marburg, where he translated Places by Patrick Hamilton . One year later, Frith translated A Pistle to the Christian Reader: The Revelation of the Anti-Christ; An Antithesis between Christ and the Pope. He also published A Disputacion of Purgatorye, divided into thre bokes in response to Thomas More , John Rastell , and Bishop John Fisher . Rastell was persuaded by this publication and adhered to the Protestant Reformation until his death. Frith explains in his A Disputation of Purgatory , that there are two purgatories, "God hath left us two purgatories; one to purge the heart and cleanse it from the filth which we have partly received of Adam … and partly added thereto by consenting unto our natural infirmity. This purgatory is the word of God, as Christ saith."[11] The second purgatory is Christ's cross. "I mean not his material cross that he himself died on, but a spiritual cross, which is adversity, tribulation, worldly depression, [etc]."[11] During this year of 1528 Frith also got married and had children.

People he encountered during his life

When John Frith first began his studies at Cambridge University; he was tutored by Stephen Gardiner , who later became the Bishop of Winchester. Gardiner instilled a "love of learning" in the young Frith, and developed a so-called great loyalty and admiration for the youth.[1] In later years, this loyalty toward Frith ended when Gardiner and Sir Thomas More began to criticize the church, but stopped when they realized that they were only adding fuel to the fire of the heretics.[8] Frith was called out of Cambridge to attend Oxford University by Thomas Wolsey , who personally gathered young men who excelled in learning and knowledge.[12] Oxford was the first place in which Frith was apprehended and committed to prison under suspicion of being in favor of Luther's doctrine.[1] He was released a short time later.

After this, Frith went to London where he made acquaintance with William Tyndale. Tyndale had a huge influence on Frith's religious views, and the two encountered much danger for their stance on purgatory.[1] The second time that Frith was imprisoned was when he went to see the Prior of Reading, a friend to whom he retreated when he ran out of money to live on.[1] Upon arriving in Reading, Frith was taken for a vagabond and a rogue.[3] Frith was arrested and put in the stocks.[10] Frith was released with the help and persuasion of Leonard Coxe , who was schoolmaster in Reading, with whom he met and discussed topics such as education, Universities, languages, etc. Coxe went to the magistrates and got him freed because of his pity and admiration for Frith's intelligence and eloquence.[1]

Sir Thomas More was the Chancellor of England at the time that Coxe had pushed for and gained Frith's freedom from imprisonment. He issued a warrant for Frith's arrest on a charge of heresy. Frith was sent to the Tower of London when he was caught trying to escape to Holland.[3] While imprisoned in the Tower, Frith composed a book on his views of purgatory and presented it to a tailor named William Holt, a man who made his acquaintance there. Holt made out to be a friend and supporter of Frith's ideas, only to take the composition given him by Frith himself and bring it to the hands of More. Upon reading Frith's book, More wrote his own composition in response. Later More would condemn Frith to death, eventually burning him at the stake.[1] [8] Ironically, More was later imprisoned in that same Tower of London for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England. He was found guilty of treason and beheaded.[13]

Return to England and arrest

In 1532, he returned to England, and warrants for his arrest were issued by Thomas More (who at the time was Lord Chancellor). In October he was arrested by the local authorities before he could arrange passage to Antwerp, wearing an elaborate disguise.[10] While imprisoned for approximately eight months in the Tower of London , Frith penned his views on Communion, fully knowing that it would be used "to purchase me most cruel death."[3] John Foxe writes of John Frith and his works and writings and of the great chains that were piled onto his body. Frith, in his last days in London's Tower, writes a final book, the Bulwark. It has been suggested that Rastell is persuaded to convert to Frith's views on Christianity because of the meetings they had together, as well as this final book. Rastell was converted through Frith's final arguments in the Bulwark. The Bulwark is an impressive book in its theological content and in its style, at times relaxed, and at other times serious.[8] Frith claims that men sin if the motives behind their good works were to gain favour with God. The emphasis, then, is placed on justification by faith.[8]

Eventually transferred from the Tower to Newgate Prison , Frith refused to stop his controversial writing. When William Tyndale learned of Frith's plight, he tried to bolster the prisoner's spirits with a pair of letters that still survive. "If your pain", Tyndale counseled, "proves to be above your strength, pray to your Father in that name, and he will ease it."

Polemical use of rhetoric and logic

John Frith's writings are in answer to, or debate with, the beliefs of men such as Bishop John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and John Rastell. In 1531 Frith published three attacks on the doctrines of purgatory and transubstantiation, which left him, according to his biographers, a wanted man. The first of these, A Disputacion of Purgatorye , answered the apologies for purgatory contained in Bishop John Fisher's Assertonis Lutheranae Confuatio (1525), in Sir Thomas More's The Supplicacion of Soules (1529), and in A New Boke of Purgatory (1530) by More's brother-in-law, John Rastell. [9] John Frith was unique among the reformers of the early Tudor period in his predilection for polemics and the very weapons of controversy, many of which he fashioned from the figures of rhetoric.

To emphasize his opponents' venality and thus question the motives for their doctrinal position, he used sarcasm, irony, significatio, and praemunitio. To prejudice his readers against opponents' arguments he used praemunitio. A "coulour of Rhetorike"—because Frith uses so many colours to debate against his opponents—which plays an important part in Frith's controversial technique is praemunitio, the orator's preparation of the audience for some succeeding portion of his speech. Frith uses this device to prejudice his readers either against his opponent's entire work prior to dealing with it, or to prejudice them against a particular passage in that work he is about to cite. To impugn his opponents' competence, he answered them with the texts they themselves had cited. [10]

Trial and death

Frith was tried before many examiners and bishops, including Thomas Cranmer , the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury .[14] He produced his own writings as evidence for his views that were deemed as heresy . He was sentenced to death by fire and offered a pardon if he answered positively to two questions: Do you believe in purgatory , and do you believe in transubstantiation ? He replied that neither purgatory nor transubstantiation could be proven by Holy Scriptures , and thus was condemned as a heretic and was transferred to the secular arm for his execution on 23 June 1533. He was burned at the stake on 4 July 1533 at Smithfield, London , for, he was told, his soul's salvation. (King Henry VIII was excommunicated one week later). Andrew Hewet, an apprentice tailor, was burned with him.[15]

 John Foxe For other people named John Fox, see John Fox (disambiguation) .
John Foxe
Born1516 Boston , Lincolnshire , England
Died1587 London, England
OccupationClergyman, author
GenreChurch history
Literary movementPuritan

John Foxe  (1516/17[1]  – 18 April 1587) was an English historian and martyrologist , the author of Actes and Monuments  (popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs ), an account of Christian  martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants  and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the reign of Mary I . Widely owned and read by English Puritans , the book helped mould British popular opinion  about the Catholic Church  for several centuries.[2]

Contents   [hide ] 
  • 1 Education
  • 2 Resignation from Oxford
  • 3 In London under Edward VI
  • 4 Marian exile
  • 5 Return to England
  • 6 Actes and Monuments
    • 6.1 First edition
    • 6.2 Second edition
    • 6.3 Third and fourth editions
    • 6.4 Accuracy
  • 7 Life under Elizabeth I
    • 7.1 Salisbury and London
    • 7.2 Death and legacy
  • 8 Personality
  • 9 Historical reputation
  • 10 See also
  • 11 Notes
  • 12 References

Education [ edit ]

Foxe was born in Boston , in Lincolnshire , England , of a middlingly prominent family[3]  and seems to have been an unusually studious and devout child.[4]  In about 1534, when he was about sixteen, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford , where he was the pupil of John Hawarden (or Harding), a fellow of the college.[5]  In 1535 Foxe was admitted to Magdalen College School , where he may either have been improving his Latin or acting as a junior instructor. He became a probationer fellow in July 1538 and a full fellow  the following July.

Foxe took his bachelor's degree on 17 July 1537, his master's degree in July 1543, and was lecturer  in logic , 1539–40.[6]  A series of letters in Foxe's handwriting dated to 1544–45, shows Foxe to be "a man of friendly disposition and warm sympathies, deeply religious, an ardent student, zealous in making acquaintance with scholars."[7]  By the time he was twenty-five, he had read the Latin and Greek fathers, the schoolmen , the canon law , and had "acquired no mean skill in the Hebrew language."[8]

Resignation from Oxford [ edit ]

Foxe resigned from his college in 1545 after becoming a Protestant and thereby subscribing to beliefs condemned by the Church of England  under Henry VIII .[9] [citation needed ] After a year of "obligatory regency" (public lecturing), Foxe would have been obliged to take holy orders  by Michaelmas  1545, and the primary reason for his resignation was probably his opposition to clerical celibacy , which he described in letters to friends as self-castration.[10]  Foxe may have been forced from the college in a general purge of its Protestant members although college records state that he resigned of his own accord and "ex honesta causa".[11]  Foxe's change of religious opinion may have temporarily broken his relationship with his stepfather and may even have put his life in danger. Foxe personally witnessed the burning of William Cowbridge in September 1538.[12]

After being forced to abandon what might have been a promising academic career, Foxe experienced a period of dire need. Hugh Latimer  invited Foxe to live with him, but Foxe eventually became a tutor in the household of Thomas Lucy  of Charlecote , near Stratford-on-Avon . Before leaving the Lucys, Foxe married Agnes Randall  on 3 February 1547.[13]  They had six children.[14]

In London under Edward VI [ edit ]

Foxe's prospects, and those of the Protestant cause generally, improved after the accession of Edward VI  in January 1547 and the formation of a Privy Council  dominated by pro-reform Protestants. In the middle of or at the end of 1547, Foxe moved to London and probably lived in Stepney . There, he completed three translations of Protestant sermons published by the "stout Protestant" Hugh Singleton.[15]  During this period Foxe also found a patron in Mary Fitzroy , Duchess of Richmond, who hired him as tutor to the orphan children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey , a Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547.[16]  (The children were Thomas , who would become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe's; Jane , later Countess of Westmorland; Henry , later earl of Northampton ; and their cousin Charles , who would later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada .) Foxe lived in the duchess's London household at Mountjoy House and later at Reigate Castle , and the duchess's patronage "facilitated Foxe's entry into the ranks of England's Protestant elite."[17]  During his stay at Reigate, Foxe helped suppress a cult that had arisen around the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Ouldsworth, which had been credited with miraculous healing powers.[18]

Foxe was ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley  on 24 June 1550, and his circle of friends, associates, and supporters included John Hooper , William Turner , John Rogers , William Cecil , and most importantly John Bale , who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology .[17]  From 1548 to 1551, Foxe brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those who he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism". He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent the two burnings for religion that occurred during the reign of Edward VI.[19]

Marian exile [ edit ]

On the accession of Mary I  in July 1553, Foxe lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk  was released from prison. Foxe walked warily as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name. As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner . Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich  to Nieuwpoort .[20]  He then traveled to Antwerp , Rotterdam , Frankfurt  and Strasbourg , which he reached by July 1554. In Strasbourg Foxe published a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and "which became the first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments ."[21]

In the autumn of 1554, Foxe moved to Frankfurt, where he served as a preacher for the English church ministering to refugees in the city. There, he was unwillingly drawn into a bitter theological controversy . One faction favored the church polity and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer  while the other advocated Reformed  models promoted by John Calvin 's Genevan church. The latter group, led by John Knox , was supported by Foxe; the former was led by Richard Cox . (In other words, the exiles were divided into Knoxians and Coxians.) Eventually, Knox. who seems to have acted with more magnanimity, was expelled, and in the fall of 1555, Foxe and about twenty others also left Frankfurt.[22]  Although Foxe clearly favored Knox, he was irenic  by temperament and expressed his disgust at "the violence of the warring factions."[23]

Moving to Basel , Foxe worked with his fellow countrymen John Bale  and Lawrence Humphrey  at the drudgery of proofreading. (Educated Englishmen were noted for their learning, industry and honesty and "would also be the last persons to quarrel with their bread and butter." No knowledge of German or French was required because the English tended to socialise with one another and could communicate with scholars in Latin.)[24] Foxe also completed and had printed a religious drama, Christus Triumphans  (1556), in Latin verse. Yet despite receiving occasional financial contributions from English merchants on the continent, Foxe seems to have lived very close to the margin and been "wretchedly poor."[25]

When Foxe received reports from England about the ongoing religious persecution there, he wrote a pamphlet urging the English nobility to use their influence with the queen to halt it. Foxe feared that the appeal would be useless, and his fears proved correct.[26]  When Knox attacked Mary Stuart  in his now famous The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women , Foxe apparently criticized Knox's "rude vehemency" although their friendship seems to have remained unimpaired.[27]

Return to England [ edit ] A page from the first edition of Actes and Monuments , also known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs , published in 1563.

After the death of Mary I in 1558, Foxe was in no hurry to return home, and he waited to see if religious changes instituted by her successor, Elizabeth I , would take root. Foxe was also so poor that he was unable to travel with his family until money was sent to him.[28]  Back in England, he seems to have lived for ten years at Aldgate , London, in the house of his former pupil, Thomas Howard , now Fourth Duke of Norfolk .[29]  Foxe quickly became associated with John Day  the printer and published works of religious controversy while working on a new martyrology that would eventually become the Actes and Monuments .

Foxe was ordained a priest by his friend Edmund Grindal , now Bishop of London , but he "was something of a puritan, and like many of the exiles, had scruples about wearing the clerical vestments laid down in the queen's injunctions of 1559." Many of his friends eventually conformed, but Foxe was "more stubborn or single-minded." Some tried to find him preferments in the new regime, but it "was not easy to help a man of so singularly unworldly a nature, who scorned to use his powerful friendships to advance himself."[30]

Actes and Monuments [ edit ]

Foxe began his Book of Martyrs in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI, with the Marian Persecutions  still in the future. In 1554, while still in exile, Foxe published in Latin at Strasbourg the first shadow of his great book, emphasising the persecution of the English Lollards  during the fifteenth century. But as word of the contemporary English persecution made its way to the continent, Foxe began to collect materials to continue his story to the present. He published the first true Latin edition of his famous book at Basel in August 1559, although the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs was "no more than a fragment."[31]

Of course, it was difficult to write contemporary English history while living (as he later said) "in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, [and] small information could be had."[32]  Nevertheless, Foxe who had left England poor and unknown, returned only poor. He had gained "a substantial reputation" through his Latin work.[33]

First edition [ edit ]

On 20 March 1563, Foxe published the first English edition of the Actes and Monuments  from the press of John Day .[34]  It was a "gigantic folio  volume" of about 1800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin book.[35]  As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments ,[36]  although the book was popularly known then, as it is now, as Foxe's Book of Martyrs . Publication of the book made Foxe instantly famous—"England's first literary celebrity"—although because there were then no royalties, Foxe remained as poor as ever although the book sold for more than ten shillings, three weeks' pay for a skilled craftsman.[37]

Second edition [ edit ]

Actes and Monuments  was immediately attacked by Catholics such as Thomas Harding , Thomas Stapleton , and Nicholas Harpsfield .[38]  In the next generation, Robert Parsons , an English Jesuit, also struck at Foxe in A Treatise of Three Conversions of England  (1603–04). Harding, in the spirit of the age, called Actes and Monuments  ' "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies'.[39]

Intending to strengthen his book against his critics, and being flooded by new material brought to light by the publication of the first edition,[40]  Foxe put together a second edition in 1570 and where the charges of his critics had been reasonably accurate, Foxe removed the offending passages. Where he could rebut the charges, "he mounted a vigorous counter-attack, seeking to crush his opponent under piles of documents."[41]  Even though he deleted material that had been included in the first edition, the second edition was nearly double the size of the first, "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" of double-columned text.[42]

The edition was well received by the English church, and the upper house of the convocation of Canterbury meeting in 1571, ordered that a copy of the Bishop's Bible  and "that full history entitled Monuments of Martyrs" be installed in every cathedral church and that church officials place copies in their houses for the use of servants and visitors. The decision was of certain benefit to Foxe's printer Day  because he had taken great financial risks printing such a mammoth work.[43]

Third and fourth editions [ edit ] Dual martyrdom by burning, 1558; from a 1641 edition of Foxe.

Foxe published a third edition in 1576, but it was virtually a reprint of the second, although printed on inferior paper and in smaller type.[44]  The fourth edition, published in 1583, the last in Foxe's lifetime, had larger type and better paper and consisted of "two volumes of about two thousand folio pages in double columns." Nearly four times the length of the Bible, the fourth edition was "the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era. It seems safe to say that it is the largest and most complicated book to appear during the first two or three centuries of English printing history."[45]  The title page included the poignant request that the author "desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer."[46]

Accuracy [ edit ]

Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius , Bede , Matthew Paris , and many others. Foxe's own contribution was his compilation of the English martyrs from the period of the Lollards  through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources of all kinds to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses, a remarkable range of sources for English historical writing of the period.[47]

Foxe's material is more accurate when he deals with his own period, although it is selectively presented, and the book is not an impartial account. Sometimes Foxe copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. Although both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe presented "lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger."[48]  Foxe's method of using his sources "proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth."[49]

Foxe often treated his material casually, and any reader "must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies."[50]  Furthermore, Foxe did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity. He made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as "Mark the apish pageants of these popelings" and "This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing",[51]  as Foxe's age was one of strong language s well as of cruel deeds.[52]  The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica went so far as to accuse Foxe of "wilful falsification of evidence."[53]  Nevertheless, Foxe is "factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere."[54]  According to J.F. Mozley, Foxe presented "lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger."[48]

Life under Elizabeth I [ edit ]

Salisbury and London [ edit ]

Foxe had dedicated Acts and Monuments  to the queen,[55]  and on 22 May 1563, he was appointed prebend  of Shipton in Salisbury Cathedral , in recognition of his championship of the English church.[56]  Foxe never visited the cathedral or performed any duties associated with the position except to appoint a vicar, William Masters , a highly educated fellow Protestant and former Marian exile. Foxe's inaction as a canon  of the cathedral led him to him being declared contumacious , and he was charged with failing to give a tithe  for repairs to the cathedral. Perhaps his poverty made him unwilling to spare the time or money to make visits or contributions. In any case, he retained the position until his death.[57]

By 1565, Foxe had been caught up in the vestments controversy  led at that time by his associate Crowley . Foxe's name was on a list of "godly preachers which have utterly forsaken Antichrist and all his Romish rags" that was presented to Lord Robert Dudley  some time between 1561 and 1564.[58]  He was also one of the twenty clergymen who on 20 March 1565 petitioned to be allowed to choose not to wear vestments ; but unlike many of the others, Foxe did not have a London benefice  to lose when Archbishop Parker  enforced conformity. Rather, when Crowley lost his position at St Giles-without-Cripplegate , Foxe may have preached in his stead.[59]

At some point before 1569, Foxe left Norfolk's  house and moved to his own on Grub Street . Perhaps his move was motivated by his concerns about Norfolk's exceptionally poor judgment in attempting to marry Mary Stuart , which led to his imprisonment in the Tower  in 1569 and his condemnation in 1572 following the Ridolfi Plot . Although Foxe had written Norfolk "a remarkably frank letter" about the injudiciousness of his course, after Norfolk's condemnation, he and Alexander Nowell  ministered to the prisoner until his execution, which Foxe attended, on 2 June 1572.[60]

In 1570, at the request of Edmund Grindal , Bishop of London, Foxe preached the Good Friday  sermon at Paul's Cross . This lofty exposition of the Protestant doctrine of redemption and attack on the doctrinal errors of the Roman Catholic Church was enlarged and published that year as A Sermon of Christ Crucified .[61]  Another sermon Foxe preached seven years later at Paul's Cross resulted in his denunciation to the Queen by the French ambassador on grounds that Foxe had advocated the right of the Huguenots  to take arms against their king. Foxe replied that he had been misunderstood: he had argued only that if the French king permitted no foreign power (the Pope) to rule over him, the French Protestants would immediately lay down their arms.[62]

In 1571, Foxe edited an edition of the Anglo-Saxon  gospels, in parallel with the Bishops' Bible  translation, under the patronage of Archbishop Parker , who was interested in Anglo-Saxon and whose chaplain, John Jocelyn was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. Foxe's introduction argues that the vernacular scripture was an ancient custom in England.[63]

Death and legacy [ edit ]

Foxe died on 18 April 1587 and was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate . His widow, Agnes, probably died in 1605. Foxe's son, Samuel Foxe (1560–1630) prospered after his father's death and "accumulated a substantial estate." Fortunately for posterity, he also preserved his father's manuscripts, and they are now in the British Library .

Personality [ edit ]

Foxe was so bookish that he ruined his health by his persistent study.[64]  Yet he had "a genius for friendship," served as a spiritual counselor and was a man of private charity. He even took part in matchmaking.[65]  Foxe was so well known as a man of prayer that Francis Drake  credited his victory at Cadiz  in part to Foxe's praying.[66]  Furthermore, Foxe's extreme unworldliness caused others to claim that he had prophetic powers and could heal the sick.[67]

Certainly, Foxe had a hatred of cruelty in advance of his age. When a number of Flemish  Anabaptists  were taken by Elizabeth's government in 1572 and sentenced to be burnt, Foxe first wrote letters to the Queen and her council asking for their lives and then wrote the prisoners themselves (having his Latin draft translated into Flemish) pleading with them to abandon what he considered their theological errors. Foxe even visited the Anabaptists in prison. (The attempted intercession was in vain; two were burnt at Smithfield  "in great horror with roaring and crying.")[68]

John Day's son Richard, who knew Foxe well, described him in 1607 as an "excellent man... exceeding laborious in his pen... his learning inferior to none of his age and time; for his integrity of life a bright light to as many as knew him, beheld him, and lived with him" [69]  Foxe's funeral was accompanied "by crowds of mourners".[70]

Historical reputation [ edit ]

After his death, Foxe's Acts and Monuments  continued to be published and appreciatively read. John Burrow refers to it as, after the Bible, "the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period."[71]

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only "the most sensational episodes of torture and death", thus giving to Foxe's work "a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author's intention."[47]  Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church  Anglicanism, the book's credibility was challenged in the early nineteenth century by a number of authors, most importantly, Samuel R. Maitland.[72]  In the words of one Catholic Victorian, after Maitland's critique, "no one with any literary pretensions... ventured to quote Foxe as an authority."[73]  Further analysis of Maitland's criticism in the twenty-first century has in the words of David Loades , that Maitland "deserves to be treated with genuine, but limited, respect. His demolition of the martyrologist's history of the Waldenses , and of some of his other medieval reconstructions, was accurate up to a point, but he never addressed those parts of the Acts and Monuments  where Foxe was at his strongest, and his general conclusion that the work was nothing but a tissue of fabrications and distortions is not supported by modern analysis."[74]

It was not until J. F. Mozley published John Foxe and His Book , in 1940. that Foxe's rehabilitation as a historian began, initiating a controversy that has continued to the present.[75]  Recently, renewed interest in Foxe as a seminal figure in early modern studies created a demand for a new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments ,

 

  • Binding: Loose Pages, Articles
  • Language: English
  • Special Attributes: Collector's Edition, Illustrated, Limited Edition
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: United Kingdom
  • Topic: Christianity, Bibles
  • Subject: Religion & Spirituality
  • Year Printed: 1570
  • Original/Facsimile: Original

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