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In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it.
This article explores the production of an edition of John Foxes Acts and Monuments (more popularly known as the ‘Book of Martyrs’), printed by Adam & Co. in 1873. The edition was prefaced by an Irish cleric, Rev. S.G. Potter, who, at the time of production, was vicar of St Lukes parish in Sheffield. This article investigates Potters career as a Protestant cleric and Orangeman, examining why he might have been chosen to preface a new edition of Foxes martyrology. Consideration is then given to the illustrations contained within the 1873 edition and what relation they bare to the woodcut illustrations in the editions of the Acts and Monuments printed during Foxes lifetime. This reveals a markedly different agenda behind the choice of illustration in the Elizabethan and Victorian editions.
This book addresses a perennial question of the English Reformation: to what extent, if any, the late medieval dissenters known as lollards influenced the Protestant Reformation in England. To answer this question, this book looks at the appropriation of the lollards by evangelicals such as William Tyndale, John Bale, and especially John Foxe, and through them by their seventeenth-century successors. Because Foxe included the lollards in his influential tome, Acts and Monuments (1563), he was the most important conduit for their individual stories, including that of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and lollard beliefs and ecclesiology. Foxe’s reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed them as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. Scholars have argued that to accomplish this, Foxe heavily edited radical lollard views on episcopacy, baptism, preaching, conventicles, tithes, and oaths, either omitting them from his book or moulding them into forms compatible with a magisterial Reformation. This book shows that Foxe in fact made no systematic attempt to downplay radical lollard beliefs, and that much non-mainstream material exists in the text. These views, legitimised by Foxe’s inclusion of them in his book, allowed for later dissenters to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their theological and ecclesiological positions. The book traces the ensuing struggle for the lollard, and indeed the Foxean, legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.
This study has explored the role of the lollards, as shaped by Foxe’s Acts and Monuments , in the course of the long English Reformation. It argues that these medieval witnesses were crucial in helping evangelicals establish the Church of England in the sixteenth century, but that they also played a theological role in its breakdown in the seventeenth. Few scholars have considered the theological legacy of the lollards in the seventeenth century, aside from making correlations between the radical beliefs that the lollards held and those
defending the established church that he had previously applied to the Quakers, embarking on a polemical career to discredit the Society which spanned more than forty years, and which effectively bankrupted him. Among his arguments, Bugg disputed the Quakers’ interpretation of their own history. Strikingly, Quakers claimed that their origins lay in the reforms of John Wyclif, the fourteenth-century Oxford theologian who was lauded in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563) as the progenitor of the Reformation. Prior to his apostasy, he had likely believed that he and his
, jumped from the pages of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments . Indeed, as a preacher himself, Foxe felt passionately about the need for a substantial preaching ministry. The lollards maintained a strong preaching tradition (with numerous sermons extant today), extending from Wyclif’s own emphasis on the open promulgation of God’s word. 8 An inflection point in what Foxe saw as the struggle for reform was the church’s repression of the lollards, manifest in the De heretico comburendo statute and in Arundel’s Constitutions . The latter, written in 1407 and issued in 1409 as
apparently jumbled beliefs he found in a lollard text, was accused in 1508 of maintaining belief in six gods and of rejecting Christ’s passion; Elizabeth Sampson, whose opinions were recorded in the same register, held that there were more souls in heaven than would come to heaven. 9 While these beliefs and their inclusion/exclusion by Foxe in Acts and Monuments (Pottier’s was incorporated, Sampson’s omitted) are fascinating, that they are so unusual meant that they were rejected by all later Protestants. 10 It is clear that these aspects of
recorded and circulated as an ‘autobiography’, until it fell into the hands of the reformers George Constantine and William Tyndale, who printed it in 1530; their version was incorporated wholesale into every early modern edition of Acts and Monuments . It was here that it achieved its exalted status as evidence of the true church amidst a time of spiritual darkness, and it was here also that the radical Independent Henry Stubbe would point his readers in his defence of Quakers a century later. Stubbe wrote during the Interregnum from his base
folk. While some lollard groups were more outspoken about other issues, Wycliffites such as John Purvey and Walter Brute, and many lollards in the Norwich community denigrated the church’s stance on nearly all the sacraments. 2 And while a rejection of transubstantiation characterised most lollard critiques of traditional eucharistic theology, in fact trial records – and indeed Foxe’s Acts and Monuments – suggest a diversity of opinion among the dissenters with regard to the efficacy and value of the sacraments. That variety lies at the heart of this chapter
discussing the political culture of the early years of Elizabeth’s reign as reflected in such texts as The Mirror of Magistrates. The second part of this chapter will examine in detail the writing of Barnabe Googe, whose works represent an attempt to produce a specifically Protestant and magisterial combination of Henrician court poetry 175 Literature and politics with Edwardian politics. The final part of this chapter will discuss John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and George Gascoigne’s work A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. It will argue that these two very different works