Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture available in Hardcover
Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture
- ISBN-10:
- 0521863813
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521863810
- Pub. Date:
- 10/12/2006
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0521863813
- ISBN-13:
- 9780521863810
- Pub. Date:
- 10/12/2006
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture
Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521863810 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/12/2006 |
| Pages: | 370 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.09(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
John N. King is Distinguished University Professor and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-86381-0 - Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture - by John N. King
Excerpt
Introduction
The present study constitutes the history of a book that epitomizes the history of the book in early modern England. This inquiry investigates the exemplarity of the Book of Martyrs as a collection that embodies a range of practices related to early modern English printing, publication, and reception that is virtually complete. At the very same time, we must recognize that this extraordinary compilation is unlike any other book published in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. John Foxe's vast collection of unforgettable accounts of religious persecution and related documents centers on the experience of hundreds of people who were burnt alive for their religious beliefs during the reign of Mary I (1553–58). Foxe oversaw expansion of his martyrological history from about 55,000 words in its initial Latin installment to a text that ballooned from about 1.8 to 3.8 million words in four vernacular editions overseen by Foxe and his publisher, John Day. Nearly four times the length of the Bible,1 the monumental fourth edition is the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era (see Figure 1). The second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) may be somewhat longer, but it lacks the complexity of paratext and spectacular woodcutillustration that made Foxe's history the best-illustrated English book of its time. No other early modern English book exceeds it in length. Taking on a life of its own after the death of the compiler and his publisher, John Day, the Book of Martyrs appeared in five more unabridged editions by 1684. Revered by many Protestants as a “holy” book, it was frequently chained alongside the Bible for reading by ordinary people at many public places including cathedrals, churches, schools, libraries, guildhalls, and at least one inn. Exemplifying textual instability and multiple authorship, each edition reflects its historical moment both as an ideological construction and as an artifact of the hand-operated press. Containing an extraordinary array of genres (E.g., martyrologies, poems, speeches, tracts, biographies, historical documents, spiritual memoirs, letters, and more), these editions manifest a full range of printing practices that appeal to more and less learned readers. They include the interplay of different type founts, marginal glosses, woodcuts or engravings, two-color printing, cross-references, and indices.
Figure 1 Selected editions and abridgements of the Book of Martyrs: The unabridged folio editions of 1583 (2 vols. bound as 1) and 1641–42 (3 vols.); Thomas Mason's Christ's Victory Over Satan's Tyranny (1615) in folio; first edition of Clement Cotton's The Mirror of Martyrs (1613) in duodecimo format.
The chief question posed by this study concerns how this aggregation of documents came to exert a greater influence on the consciousness of early modern England than any other book aside from the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer. Close examination of multiple copies of each edition suggests that Foxe's untiring energy as a collector of documents and his command of sophisticated editorial procedures, in combination with his publisher's mastery of book production and sales, enabled the Book of Martyrs to promote change in religion, national identity, and intellectual and social life. Not only does this study situate the Book of Martyrs within the context of printing and publication in London, but it also considers continental antecedents and the interchange between the circulation of manuscripts and printing of books. Exemplifying a complete constellation of features associated with early modern English print culture, Foxe's book serves as a window into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English cultural history. Each of the four editions produced during the lifetime of Foxe and his publisher, John Day, contains unique additions and/or deletions of material that render the text of each edition significantly different from the others. Each of the posthumous editions also contains significant additions contributed by different continuators. Furthermore, a variety of abridgments reshaped the text in radically different ways. The impact of this book on worldwide Anglophone culture endures to the present day, albeit in highly distorted forms, in reprints, abridgments, movies, and websites.
The present investigation observes the practice of contemporary booksellers and readers, who referred to the Book of Martyrs, a short title that may have originated in a similar headline in the first edition (pp. 85–173, 178–79). The formal title makes up in precision for what it lacks in conciseness and elegance:
Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, touching matters of the Church, wherein ar comprehended and described the great persecutions & horrible troubles, that have bene wrought and practised by the Romishe Prelates, speciallye in this Realme of England and Scotlande, from the yeare of our Lorde a thousande, unto the tyme nowe present. Gathered and collected according to the true copies & wrytinges certificatorie, as wel of the parties them selves that suffered, as also out of the Bishops Registers, which wer the doers therof, by John Foxe.
It was the prerogative of the publisher, John Day, to craft the title page (Figure 2) in the form of an advertisement for this costly book, which went on sale in 1563 at the bookshop beneath the printing house at his premises within London Wall. Not only was his shop located at the edge of the booksellers' district that surrounded St. Paul's Cathedral, but it was also ideally situated to appeal to those who passed through Aldersgate en route to and from London via the Great North Road.2 It seems likely that Foxe collaborated in the composition of this detailed descriptive title of the history of the “true” church from the time of John Wyclif until the reign of Mary I. After all, he declares that “I wrote no such booke bearyng the title of the booke of Martyrs. I wrote a booke called the Actes and Monumentes . . . Wherin many other matters bee contayned beside the Martyrs of Christ” (1570, p. 694). Foxe's preference for this discursive title furthermore reflects the fact that the unabridged text constitutes much more than a collection of martyrologies. Nevertheless, printers and publishers used the short title in records kept by the Company of Stationers, and the eighth edition (1641) bears the half-title of “THE BOOKE OF MARTYRS.” It was under this half-title, therefore, that stock keepers at the Stationers' warehouse stored copies of this book after the Company acquired its copyright.
Figure 2 The left- and right-hand sides of the title-page woodcut of the Book of Martyrs (1563) respectively portray “true” versus “false” religion. Insets at the bottom offer contrasting caricatures of Protestant versus Roman Catholic worship. The sun-bright Tetragrammaton at the lower left symbolizes divine illumination of a congregation that includes figures who read the Bible as the preacher delivers a sermon. The opposed vignette depicts individuals who tell their rosary beads as a friar preaches and a Corpus Christi procession proceeds toward a roadside shrine. At the apex of this Judgment scene, Christ welcomes the souls of the saved and condemns the falling angels and priests who celebrate the Mass beneath them.
Purchasers encountered this half-title in unbound gatherings displayed at bookshops in the vicinity of St. Paul's Cathedral in London or in the stalls of provincial booksellers. Purchasers included the parochial library at Gorton in Lancashire, which acquired its copy of the 1641 version out of the proceeds of a bequest from a prosperous merchant of Manchester. Parish officials originally planned to chain it for safekeeping within a wooden book chest whose carved inscription – “THE GIFT OF HUMPHREY CHETHAM ESQUIRE 1655” – commemorates this pious benefaction (Figure 3). A recipient of the ninth edition (1684), the nearby parish library at Bolton-on-the-Moors, chained its copy to the top shelf of a wooden chest whose inscription commemorates a benefaction from a well-to-do Londoner who had some connection to this parish in Lancashire: “THE GIFT OF MR JAMES LEAVER CITISON OF LONDON 1694” (Figure 4). The calfskin binding of each of its three volumes bears a brass plate that proclaims further that Leaver donated it during the same year.3
Figure 3 The armarium or wooden book chest from the parish library of Gorton, Lancashire. Carved lettering acknowledges that an endowment by Humphrey Chetham allowed for acquisition of the original library, which included the 1641 edition of the Book of Martyrs. Most of the original collection remains tethered with chains.
Figure 4 The armarium that contains the chained library from the parish of Bolton-on-the-Moors, Lancashire. A carved inscription and brass plates on each of the three volumes of the eighth edition of the Book of Martyrs commemorate the 1694 benefaction of James Leaver, a well-to-do citizen of London.
During the early modern era, donations of the Book of Martyrs to parish libraries and other institutions sometimes discharged a memorial function roughly analogous to medieval practices that commemorated the dead. This book sanitizes increasingly dim memories of monastic libraries, however, by excluding allegedly superstitious material. Long after religious reformers demolished shrines and eradicated chantry chapels during the Edwardian Reformation, gifts of books and libraries continued to commemorate the piety of evangelical donors. Prior to the destruction of chantries during the reign of Edward VI (1547–53), mortuary endowments and bequests underwrote the singing of perpetual Masses for the dead. Not only did the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) entail rejection of purgatory and intercessory prayers, but it also supplanted older modes of commemoration. This shift provided donors with an opportunity to give devotional books as a pious act.4 Foxe's quasi-iconic book accordingly joined the Bible in occupying cultural space left empty by repeated waves of iconoclasm that swept England between the 1530s and 1650s (see Figures 23 and 29).
The commemorative function of donated copies of the Book of Martyrs corresponds to memorialism that is inherent within Foxe's encyclopedic collection of documents concerning the history of western Christendom. We may note the memorial function of books in volumes that are incorporated into the fabric of some funerary monuments, for example the alabaster and marble memorial to Sir Thomas Bodley at Merton College, Oxford. The carving of pillars in the form of stacked books is appropriate to the memory of the librarian who founded the Bodleian Library.5 The notion of textual commemoration that informs Foxe's monumental assemblage of acts and monuments anticipates a sentiment in Sir Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning. This book recalls Catholic commemorative practices in its praise of libraries as “shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.”6 The enduring remains of martyrs who were denied Christian burial accordingly consist not of bones, fragments of clothing, or instruments of torture, but texts that undergo preservation within a tomblike history. Both the title and construction of Foxe's book involve wordplay on the multiple senses of monument as a term for written document, sepulcher, funerary memorial, or enduring marker.7 Sonnet 55 by William Shakespeare exemplifies the conventionality of this topos of text as monument:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.(lines 1–4)
In the particular case of Foxe's collection, martyrological acts (in the sense of acta, i.e., “deeds” or lives of martyrs) and monuments (i.e., written testimonials of faith to the point of death) supplant emphasis on relics and miracles in medieval legends of the saints. Although some reformed martyrologies had already gone into print (e.g., John Bale's editions of the prosecutorial examinations of Sir John Oldcastle and Anne Askew), Foxean martyrologies derive to a very considerable degree from manuscripts written by martyrs as they awaited execution or by copyists, to which the compiler added extracts concerning the prosecution of alleged heretics from documents including the episcopal registers that receive mention on the title page. In manuscript or print, martyrological testimonials function in the manner of verbal, as opposed to corporeal, relics of the saints. Foxe's goal is to preserve the speeches and deeds of “true” martyrs in the form of documents that memorialize the faithful suffering of new-style saints. The book as a whole therefore functions in the manner of a symbolic reliquary that preserves for posterity the deeds and words that constitute the essence of saintly sacrifice.8 The idea of text as relic or book as reliquary presupposes a transformation in the conception of saintliness, because Foxe and his Protestant contemporaries eliminated intercession of the saints of the kind celebrated in traditional hagiographies. The compiler therefore contributes to the Reformation campaign to identify sainthood with the early Christian conception of martyrdom as an act of witnessing to religious faith. After all, martyr derives from μάρτυς, which means “witness” in Greek. The essence of martyrdom lies in witnessing to religious faith to the point of death.
As an adjunct to saintly acts and monuments, the manifold woodcuts that illustrate the Book of Martyrs are fundamentally different from traditional representations of saints who strike iconic poses and carry iconographical attributes that identify them in seemingly countless religious images (e.g., St. Paul bearing the sword of his decollation or the aged figure of St. Peter crowned with a tiara and holding a pair of keys). Inviting the devout gaze of spectators, traditional images of saints often flank donors or devotees who gaze inward from their own naturalistic world on a static scene of saintly activity. This is the case, for example, in an altarpiece that portrays Henry VII and members of his family, both living and dead. The open prayer books on the prie-dieu at which Henry and Elizabeth of York kneel represent a central component of this representation of traditional piety. An overarching portrayal of St. George defeating the Dragon visualizes the king's prayer for intercession on behalf of himself and his relatives. Nevertheless, it is the painting itself that constituted a royal donation to Sheen, a monastery near Richmond.9 With its portrayal of prayer for the dead that is consonant with the doctrine of purgatory, this altarpiece represents a devotional mode quite different from early modern applications of the Book of Martyrs. Those who read copies at the ends of chains to which they were tethered at the parish library of Bolton-on-the-Moors, for example, encountered scores of woodcuts that are informed by the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Unlike traditional saints, Foxean martyrs are recognizable people from all walks of life who are invested with neither supernatural powers nor the power of intercession between the human and divine. They range from lowly peasants to learned bishops. Exemplifying the Protestant conviction that divinely imputed faith informs ordinary individuals with a capacity to testify to their beliefs despite pain, suffering, and death, these woodcut portrayals provide visual models worthy of emulation by other believers.
Few if any insular precedents existed for large and expensive illustrated folios of this kind, because the chronic shortage of capital and almost complete absence of domestic paper manufacture militated against the printing of big books by London printers. For example, the native book trade failed to produce Bibles suitable for chaining in churches until the 1540s. A Vulgate Bible published in 1535 by the King's Printer, Thomas Berthelet, is the earliest extant example of a complete Bible printed in England and the sole example of a Latin Bible printed prior to the reign of Elizabeth I.10 This should come as no surprise, because it was less costly to import Latin books printed on the continent than to produce them in London. Marketability must have been a factor in the printer's decision to employ quarto rather than folio format for this Bible. The same year marked the appearance of the Coverdale Bible, the first complete Bible in the English language, as an unacknowledged publication by Merten de Keyser, one of the most accomplished printers in Antwerp.11 Although this edition was not officially sanctioned, despite its title-page portrayal of Henry VIII conferring the Bible on bishops and nobles, merchants imported and marketed it without hindrance. De Keyser commissioned woodcuts based on continental models. Under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's vicegerent for religious affairs, Edward Whitchurch and Richard Grafton then undertook to publish the first authorized English translation. Even these partners secured the services of François Regnault because of the superiority of Parisian typography, presswork, and paper. When the Inquisition blocked completion of this printing job, Grafton and Whitchurch shipped the already printed sheets and wooden blocks to London in order to complete the printing of this book and its rather old-fashioned illustrations. Known as the Great Bible (1539) because of its grandiose size, it was acquired by English parish churches under the terms of the Royal Injunctions of 1538.12 In being chained for reading by members of the public, it anticipates the placement in churches of a handful of books including Erasmus's Paraphrases of the New Testament, the Book of Martyrs, and John Jewel's Apology of the Church of England. Among very few contemporary books that approximate Foxe's book in dimensions or density of illustration are the first edition of Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) and John Day's own edition of an English translation of Euclid's The Elements of Geometry (1570). Nevertheless, they cannot rival the unique array of large woodcuts that John Day commissioned as tailor-made illustrations for specific martyrdoms. Woodcuts are absent from the more massive second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, whose costliness necessitated the formation of a partnership among five booksellers.
Thriving continental printing enterprises were better able than those in England to print monumental folios on large subjects that satisfied the early modern hunger for huge compendia of knowledge. Key advantages that foreign printers enjoyed included access to larger markets that were concomitant with greater density of population, availability of capital investment, local manufacture of high-quality paper, superior type founding, and finer woodcut or copperplate illustration. The many publications of Conrad Gesner, a Swiss theologian to whom Foxe and Bale were linked within European humanistic circles, included folios whose monumentality was akin to that of Foxe's book. Indeed, this physician and naturalist contributed a Latin epitaph on John Hooper to a Latin precursor of the Book of Martyrs that Foxe compiled during exile in Basel.13 Christopher Froschauer, the eminent Zurich printer, produced encyclopedic books constructed by Gesner including the four folio volumes of Historia animalium (1551–58), which are filled with excellent, albeit frequently inaccurate, engravings. His Bibliotheca universalis (1545) contains a summation of all knowledge in the nascent field of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew bibliography. In a two‐part sequel entitled Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalim, libri XXI (1548–49), this polymath constructed an encyclopedia of universal knowledge divided into multiple books.
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