Title page of the first English-language edition, 1563

Frontispiece to the 1761 edition of "Foxe's Book of Martyrs"

Acts and Monuments by John Foxe, popularly abridged as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is a celebrated work of church history and martyrology, first published in English in 1563 by John Day.

Introduction[link]

The book was lavishly produced and illustrated with over sixty exemplary woodcuts and was the largest publishing project ever undertaken in England.^[1] Their product was a single volume book, a bit over a foot long, two palms-span wide, too deep to lift with only one hand, and weighed about the same as a small infant.^[2] Foxe's own title for the first edition (as scripted and spelled), is Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church. Long titles being conventionally expected, so this title continues and claims that the book describes "persecutions and horrible troubles" that had been "wrought and practiced by the Roman Prelates, speciallye in this realm of England and Scotland". Foxe's temporal range was "from the yeare of our Lorde a thousand unto the tyme nowe present"^[3]

Following closely on the heels of the first edition (Foxe complained that the text was produced at "a breakneck speed"), the 1570 edition was in two volumes and had expanded considerably. The page count went from approximately 1800 pages in 1563, to over 2300 folio pages. Sixty impressive woodcuts became one hundred and fifty, often stellar examples of woodcrafting expertise --and speed. The illustrations could not be borrowed from other texts, as was commonly practiced. They had to be newly cut precisely to illustrate particular details as Foxe wrote the stories of his own living (or executed) contemporaries, and linked England's suffering back to "the primitive tyme" until, in volume I, "the reigne of King Henry VIII"; in volume two, from Henry's time to "Queen Elizabeth our gracious Lady now reygnyng".^[4]

Foxe's title for the second edition (vol I) is quite different from the first edition where he claimed his material as "these latter days of peril...touching on matters of the Church'. In 1570, Foxe's book is an "Ecclesiastical History" containing "the acts and monuments [no capitals] of thynges passed in every kynges tyme in this realm [England], specially in the Church of England". It describes "persecutions, horrrible troubles, the suffering of martyrs [new], and other such thinges incident ... in England and Scotland, and [new] all other forreine nations". The second volume of the 1570 edition has its own title page and, again, an altered subject. Volume II is an "Ecclesiastical History conteyning the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs" [capitalized in original] and offers "a general discourse of these latter persecutions, horrible troubles and tumults styred up by Romish ['Roman' in 1563] Prelates in the Church". Again leaving the reference, to which church, uncertain, the title concludes "in this realm of England and Scotland as partly also to all other forrine nations apparteynyng".^[5]

The question of title[link]

Acts 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."^[6] It may have been Grindal's "book of martyrs" (as he had conceived the project), but it was not John Foxe's. 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.

"I wrote no such booke bearying the title Booke of Martyrs. I wrote a booke called the Acts and Monumentes ... wherin many other matters be contayned beside the martyrs of Christ.” – John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments (1570) ^[7]

There is also evidence that the 'martyr' title only referred to the abridgments, as used by John Milner (1795), no friend to Foxe, who sees his work at the centre of efforts to "inflame hatred" against Catholics in the eighteenth century.

"We find the lying Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, with large wooden prints of men and women, encompassed with faggots and flames in every leaf of them, chained to the desks of many county churches, whilst abridgements of this inflammatory work are annually issued from the London press under the title of The Book of Martyrs."^[8]

A work of the English Reformation[link]

Published early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and only five years after the death of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was an affirmation of the Protestant Reformation in England during a period of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Foxe's account of church history asserted a historical justification that was intended to establish the Church of England as a continuation of the true Christian church rather than as a modern innovation, and it contributed significantly to a nationalistic repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church.

The sequence of the work, initially in five books, covered first early Christian martyrs, a brief history of the medieval church, including the Inquisitions, and a history of the Wycliffite or Lollard movement.^[9] It then dealt with the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, during which the dispute with Rome had led to the separation of the English Church from papal authority and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer. The final book treated the reign of Queen Mary and the Marian Persecutions.

Editions[link]

John Foxe died in 1587. His text, however, continued to grow. ^[10] Foxe himself set the precedent, substantially expanding Acts and Monuments between 1563 and 1570. The 1576 edition was cheaply done, with few changes, but for the 1583 printing Foxe added a "Discourse of the Bloody Massacre In France [St. Bartholomew's. Day, 1572]" and other short pieces. The 1596 fifth edition was essentially a reprint of the 1583 edition. The next editor, however, followed Foxe's example and in 1610 brought the work "up to the time of King James" and included a retelling of the French massacre. The 1632 edition added a topical outline and chronology, along with a "continuation of the foreign martyrs; additions of like persecutions in these later times" which included the Spanish invasion (1588), and the Gunpowder Treason (1605). The editor for the 1641 edition brought it to "the time of Charles, now King",and added a copperplate portrait of John Foxe to accompany Simeon Foxe's "Life" of his father. The most "sumptuous" edition of 1684 anticipated James with gilt-edged, heavy bond paper and copperplate etchings that replaced worn-out woodcut illustrations.^[11]

As edition followed edition, Acts and Monuments or 'Foxe' began to refer to an iconic series of texts; unless constrained by a narrow band of time, Acts and Monuments has always referred to more than a single edition. The popular influence of Acts and Monuments declined, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed to include mainly scholars and evangelicals. It was still sufficiently popular among them to warrant (at least) fifty-five printings of various abridgements in only a century, and to generate scholarly editions and commentary. Debate about Foxe's veracity and the text's contribution to anti-Catholic propaganda continued. Acts and Monuments survived whole primarily within academic circles, with remnants only of the original text appearing in abridgements, generically called The Book of Martyrs, or plain Foxe.^[12]

Latin versions[link]

Foxe began his work in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI. Over the next thirty years, it developed from small beginnings (in Latin) to a substantial compilation, in English, filling large folio volumes. In 1554, in exile, Foxe published in Latin at Strasbourg a foreshadowing of his major work, emphasising the persecution of the English Lollards during the 15th century; and he began to collect materials to continue his story to his own day. Foxe published the version in Latin at Basel in August 1559, lacking sources, with the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs as "no more than a fragment."^[17] 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."^[18] He made a reputation through his Latin works.^[19] Both these versions were intended as the first volume of a two-volume work, the second volume to have a broader, European scope. Foxe did not publish these works; but a second volume to the Basel version was written by Henry Pantaleon (1563).^[20]

First edition[link]

In March 1563, Foxe published the first English edition of The Actes and Monuments from the press of John Day. Day's epitaph reads: "He set a Foxe to write how martyrs run/By death to life. Foxe ventured pains and health/To give them light: Daye spent in print his wealth,/And God with gain restored his wealth again,/ And gave to him as he gave to the poor." ^[21] It was a "gigantic folio volume" of about 1800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin book.^[22] As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments. Publication of the book made Foxe famous; the book sold for more than ten shillings, three weeks' pay for a skilled craftsman, but with no royalty to the author.^[23]

Second edition[link]

The second edition appeared in 1570, much expanded. New material was available, including personal testimonies,^[19] and publications such as the 1564 edition of Jean Crespin's Geneva martyrology.^[24] John Field assisted with research for this edition.^[25]

Acts and Monuments was immediately attacked by Catholics, including Thomas Harding, Thomas Stapleton, and Nicholas Harpsfield.^[26] 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 Acts and Monuments ' "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies'.^[27] In the second edition, 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."^[28] Even with deletions, the second edition was nearly double the size of the first, "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" of double-columned text.^[29]

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 repaid the financial risks taken by Day.^[30]

Third and fourth editions[link]

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.^[31] 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."^[32] At this point Foxe began to compose his interpretation of the Apocalypse; he wrote more in Eicasmi (1587), left unfinished at his death.^[33]

The 1583 title page included the poignant request that the author "desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer."^[34]

The Abridgements[link]

The first abridgment appeared in 1589. Offered only two years after Foxe's death, it honoured his life and was a timely commemorative for the English victory against the Spanish Armada (1588). ^[35] Issued with a dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham, Timothy Bright's tight summary of Acts and Monuments headed a succession of hundreds of editions of texts based on Foxe's work, whose editors were more selective in their reading. Based with greater or lesser degrees of exactitude on the original Acts and Monuments, yet influenced always by it, editors continued to tell its tale in both popular and academic venues (although a different tale was told to each gathering).^[36]

"The Book{s} of Martyrs"[link]

The majority of the editors knew Foxe's text as a martyrology. Taking their material primarily from only the last two books of Acts and Monuments (that is, volume II of the 1570 edition), generated texts that genuinely were "Book(s) of Martyrs". Famous scenes from Acts and Monuments, in illustrated text, were revived for each new generation. The earliest printed book bearing the title, "Book of Martyrs", however, appears to be John Taylor's edition in 1631. While occuring again periodically, that title was not much in use before the mid-seventeen hundreds, and not regularized as the title of choice before 1850. The title, Foxe's Book of Martyrs (where the author's name reads as if part of the title) appears first in John Kennedy's 1840 edition, but this may be just a printing error.^[37]

William Tyndale, just before being strangled and burned at the stake, cries out, "Lord, open the King of England's eyes", in woodcut from an early edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

Characterized by some scholars as "Foxe's bastards", these Foxe-derived texts have recently received increasing attention and recognition as the actual medium through which Foxe and his ideas influenced popular consciousness.^[38] Nineteenth-century professionalizing scholars, who wanted to keep separate their (academically significant) Acts and Monuments, clear from the abridgements' "vulgar corruption", dismissed these later editions as expressing "narrowly evangelical Protestant piety" and as nationalistic tools produced only "to club Catholics". Their judgment says more about their own prejudices that it does about any of these texts, as we know very little about any of these editions. ^[39] Characterized most recently as 'Foxe', with ironic quotation marks signaling a suspect term, and also as "Foxe-in-action", these Foxe-derived texts have much yet to teach researchers about the nature of their subject.^[40]

Foxe as Historian[link]

The author's credibility was challenged as soon as the book first appeared. Detractors accused Foxe of dealing falsely with the evidence, of misusing documents, and of telling partial truths. In every case that he could clarify, Foxe corrected errors in the second edition and third and fourth, final version (for him). In the early nineteenth century the charges were taken up again by a number of authors, most importantly Samuel Roffey Maitland.^[41] Subsequently Foxe was considered a poor historian, in mainstream reference works. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica accused Foxe of "wilful falsification of evidence"; two years later in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Francis Fortescue Urquhart wrote of the value of the documentary content and eyewitness reports, but claimed that Foxe "sometimes dishonestly mutilates his documents and is quite untrustworthy in his treatment of evidence".^[42]

Foxe's source reliability[link]

In contrast, J. F. Mozley maintained that Foxe preserved a high standard of honesty, arguing that Foxe's method of using his sources "proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth."^[43] The 2009 Encyclopædia Britannica notes that Foxe's work is "factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere." It was typical,however, in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries to treat Foxe's text as "not to be trusted....If not the father of lies, Foxe was thought to be the master of inventions, and so readers of the Encyclopedia [sic] Britannica were advised and warned." ^[44]

Documented grounds[link]

Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius, Bede, Matthew Paris, and many others. He compiled an English martyrology from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses.^[19] In the work of collection Foxe had Henry Bull as collaborator.^[45] The account of the Marian years is based on Robert Crowley's 1559 extension of a 1549 chronicle history by Thomas Cooper, itself an extension of a work begun by Thomas Lanuet. Cooper (who became a Church of England Bishop) strongly objected to Crowley's version of his history and soon issued two new "correct" editions.^[46] John Bale set Foxe onto martyrological writings and contributed to a substantial part of Foxe's ideas as well as printed material.^[47]

Objectivity and advocacy[link]

Foxe's book is in no sense an impartial account of the period. He did not hold to later centuries' notions of neutrality or objectivity, but 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."^[48] David Loades has suggested that Foxe's history of the political situation, at least, is 'remarkably objective'. He makes no attempt to make martyrs out of Wyatt and his followers, or anyone else who was executed for treason, except George Eagles, whom he describes as falsely accused."^[49]

Sidney Lee writing in the Dictionary of National Biography called Foxe "a passionate advocate, ready to accept any primâ facie evidence". Lee also listed some specific errors and pieces of plagiarism. In developing the same metaphor, Thomas S. Freeman argues that Foxe "may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."

By the end of the 17th 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."^[19] Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church Anglicanism, the book's credibility was effectively challenged in the early 19th century by a number of authors, most importantly Samuel Roffey Maitland.^[19][50] Dominic Trenow O.P. commented on Foxe's lost credibility across denominations, citing Maitland and Richard Frederick Littledale, as well as Robert Parsons and John Milner.^[51] In the words of this Victorian Catholic priest, after Maitland's critique and others of the time, Foxe's historical influence had been diminished so that "no one with any literary pretensions...ventured to quote Foxe as an authority."^[52]

The publication of J. F. Mozley's biography of Foxe in 1940 reflected a change in perspective that reevaluated Foxe's work and "initiated a rehabilitation of Foxe as a historian which has continued to this day."^[19] A new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments appeared in 1992.^[53]

"Since Mozley’s landmark study (1940)," Warren Wooden observed in 1983 , "Foxe's reputation as a careful and accurate, albeit partisan, historian especially of the events of his own day, has been cleansed and restored with the result that modern historians no longer feel constrained to apologize automatically for evidence and examples drawn from the ‘’Acts and Monuments’’.^[54] Patrick Collinson's formal acknowledgement and recognition of "John Foxe as Historian," invites redetermining historians' current relationship with the text. "John Foxe waa the "greatest [English] historian of his age," Collinson concluded, "and the greatest revisionist ever".^[55]

Religious perspectives[link]

For the English Church, Foxe's book remains a fundamental witness to the sufferings of faithful Christians at the hands of the anti-Protestant Roman Catholic authorities and to the miracle of their endurance unto death, sustained and comforted by the faith to which they bore living witness as martyrs. Foxe emphasizes the right of English people to hear or read the Holy Scripture in their own language and receive its message directly rather than as mediated through a priesthood. The valour of the martyrs in the face of persecution became a component of English identity.^[56] Roman Catholics consider Foxe a significant source of English [[anti-Catholicism], charging among other objections to the work, that the treatment of martyrdoms under Mary ignores the contemporary mingling of political and religious motives — for instance, ignoring the possibility that some victims may have intrigued to remove Mary from the throne.^[57]

Influence[link]

Dual martyrdom by burning, 1558; from a 1641 edition of Foxe.

Following a 1571 Convocation order, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals, select churches, and even several bishops' and guild halls; whereby God's truth reinforced local truth, and local truth, God's. Selected readings from the text were proclaimed from the pulpit as was (and as if it were) Scripture. It was read and cited by both ecclesiastical and common folk, disputed by prominent Catholics, and defended by prominent Anglicans. Acts and Monuments sailed with England’s gentleman pirates, encouraged the Saints in Oliver Cromwell’s army, and graced the halls at Oxford and Cambridge.^[58]

Acts and Monuments is credited as among the most influential of English texts. Gordon Rupp called it "an event". He counted it as a “normative document”, and as one of the Six Makers of English Religion.^[59] Nor was Foxe's influence limited to the direct effects of his text. At least two of Rupp's "makers" continued and elaborated Foxe's views. Christopher Hill, with others, has noted that John Bunyan cherished his Book of Martyrs among the few books that he kept with him while imprisoned. William Haller observed that John Milton's Of Reformation in England, and other tracts, took “not only the substance of the account…but also the point of view straight out of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Haller means by this, “the view of history advanced by propaganda in support of the national settlement in church and state under Elizabeth, kept going by the increasing reaction against the politics of her successors, and revived with great effect by the puritan opposition to Anglican prelacy in the Long Parliament.” ^[60]

After Foxe's death, the 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."^[61]

Position in English consciousness[link]

The original Acts and Monuments was printed in 1563. This text, its dozens of textual alterations (Foxe's Book of Martyrs in many forms), and their scholarly interpretations, helped to frame English consciousness (national, religious and historical), for over four hundred years. Evoking images of the sixteenth-century martyred English, of Elizabeth enthroned, the Enemy overthrown, and danger averted, Foxe's text and its images served as a popular and academic code. It alerted English folk to the threat in harbouring citizens who bore allegiance to foreign powers, and it laid an anchor for their xenophobia. Acts and Monuments is academically linked with notions of English nationhood, liberty, tolerance, election, apocalypse, and Puritanism. The text helped to situate the English monarchy in a tradition of English Protestantism, particularly Whiggism; and it influenced the seventeenth-century radical tradition by providing materials for local martyrologies, ballads, and broadsheets.^[62]

In historiography[link]

Warren Wooden presented John Foxe's key significance as a transitional figure in English historiography in 1983. "Foxe identified the key themes of the Reformation … along with the central props of Protestant belief." Wooden observed that Foxe also did much to determine the grounds of the controversy. By offering a full scale historical investigation, "Foxe helped to shape the controversy along historical and prophetic lines, rather than epistemological or linguistic ones.’ ^[63] Patrick Collinson confirmed that Foxe was indeed a worthy scholar and that his text was historiographically reliable in 1985, and set in process the British Academy's funding for a new critical edition in 1984, completed by 2007.^[64]

Acts and Monuments acted as something of a Bible for English folk (commonly asserted) and also for academics (rarely acknowledged), influencing their histories, historical sensibility and consciousness to an unprecedented degree. University-trained researchers professionalized the original author's findings, his facts checked and challenged, being more often proved than not in seventeenth-eighteenth century inquiries, and their findings were verified through the next two centuries. Foxe's data and vision sensibly provided a foundation for informed academic conclusions. John Strype was among the early beneficiaries, and he praised John Foxe for preserving the documents on which his own ecclesiastical history depended.^[65]

Acts and Monuments substantially defined, among many other histories from John Strype onward, Arthur G. Dickens's influential The English Reformation (1964, 1989 revised), which has been characterized by a critic as “a sophisticated exposition of a story first told by John Foxe”.^[66] Why should that dependency be so worthy of comment? Dickens wrote a history that was informed by facts and -- similarly to Milton -- also the substance of his text, derived directly from Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Foxe's historical vision and the documentation to support it, was taught to young Arthur Dickens, along with his fellows, as a schoolboy.^[67]

Historiography, as the study of the writing of history, is in this case subsumed in history, as that which happened in the past and continues into the colloquial present. Discussing Foxe in the constructions of historical (national/religious) consciousness has always been also a discussion about the meaning and writing of history. Approaching this subject puts researchers into a kind of liminal zone between borders, where relations slip from one category to another – from writing history, to discussing history writing (historiography), to considering collective history in human consciousness (historical consciousness and collective memory).

The text in this case has always been multiple and complex. Several researchers have remarked on how malleable, how easily mutable Foxe's text was, and so inherently contradictory, characteristics that increased its potential influence.^[68] It is a difficult text to pin down, what Collinson called "a very unstable entity", indeed, "a moving target". ”We used to think that we were dealing with a book,” Collinson mused aloud at the third Foxe Congress (1999), “understood in the ordinary sense of that term, a book written by an author, subject to progressive revision but always the same book ... and [we thought] that what Foxe intended he brought about.” ^[69]

Through the late nineties and into the twenty-first century, the Foxe Project has maintained funding for the new critical edition of Acts and Monuments and to help promote Foxeian studies, including five “John Foxe" Congresses and four publications of their collected papers, in addition to dozens of related articles and two specialized books or more produced independently.

Modern reception and anniversary[link]

March 2013 will mark 450 years since Foxe's 1563 publication. Foxe's first edition capitalized on new technology (the printing press). Similarily, the new critical edition of Acts and Monuments benefits from, and is shaped by, new technologies. Digitalized for the internet generation, scholars can now search and cross-reference each of the first four editions, and benefit from several essays introducing the texts. The conceptual repertoire available for reading has so altered from that of John Foxe's era that it has been asked how it is possible to read it at all.^[70]

Patrick Collinson concluded at the third Foxe Congress (Ohio, 1999) that as a result of the "death of the author" and necessary accommodations to the "postmodern morass" (as he termed it then), The Acts and Monuments "is no longer a book [in any conventional sense]".^[71] If it is not a book, then what is it? We are not witnessing an end to reading. Rather, researchers are participating in the formulation of new understandings about how to read texts that aren't books, and learning to manage the emergence of subjects never before known.

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Actes and Monuments

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Actes and Monuments

Anglicanism portal

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

External links[link]

• Rekindling the Reformation By: Walter J. Veith
• BBC audio file (45 mins) In Our Time on Foxe's Book of Martyrs
• Complete e-book at Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Very much abridged, and with additional material added, by William Byron Forbush.
• John Foxe. Acts and Monuments. The Variorum Edition. (hriOnline, Sheffield 2004). Complete, with original spelling and punctuation.
• Catholic Encyclopedia entry
• Text of the Book of martyrs (19th Century reprint of 1563 edition with spelling modernised and new illustrations; unabridged but still incomplete)
• Chapter selections of Foxe's Book of Martyrs
• Foxe's Book of Martyrs – Project Gutenberg – Original Text
• "Critical apparatus and additional material" of the Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition includes a score of interpretative essays about Foxe and the Book of Martyrs.
• Book of Martyrs by John Foxe (online book)

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Foxe, John". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. 

John Foxe
Born	1516 Boston, Lincolnshire, England1
Died	1587 England
Occupation	clergyman, author
Genres	church history
Literary movement	Puritan

John Foxe (1517^[1] – 18 April 1587) was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what is popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs (properly The Acts and Monuments), 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]

Education[link]

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 of 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[link]

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] 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[link]

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 or latter part 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 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[link]

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 fall 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 the greater 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 socialize with each other 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 his friend 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[link]

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]

[edit] Actes and Monuments

Dual martyrdom by burning, 1558; from a 1641 edition of Foxe.

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, emphasizing 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[link]

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 despite the fact that the book sold for more than ten shillings, three week's pay for a skilled craftsman.^[37]

Second edition[link]

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[link]

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[link]

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 as 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[link]

Salisbury and London[link]

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 he had been misunderstood, that he had argued only that if the French king permitted no foreign power (i.e. 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[link]

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[link]

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]

Foxe's historical reputation[link]

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, Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition.

In the words of Thomas S. Freeman, one of the most important living Foxe scholars, "current scholarship has formed a more complex and nuanced estimate of the accuracy of Acts and Monuments....Perhaps [Foxe] may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."^[17]

See also[link]

Anglicanism portal

• Foxe's Book of Martyrs
• Religion in the United Kingdom

References[link]

• Freeman, Thomas S. (2004) "Foxe, John," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• Haller, William (1963) Foxe's First Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: Jonathan Cape
• MacLure, Millar (comp.) (1989) Register of Sermons Preached at Paul's Cross 1534–1642; revised and expanded by Peter Pauls and Jackson Campbell Boswell. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions
• Mozley, J. F. (1940) John Foxe and His Book. London: SPCK
• The "Critical apparatus and additional material" of the Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition includes a score of interpretative essays about Foxe and the Book of Martyrs.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Foxe

Wikisource has original works written by or about: John Foxe

• Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Actes and Monuments) Variorum Edition Online, from the Humanities Research Institute of The University of Sheffield
• Thomas Freeman, John Foxe: A Biography
• Complete e-book at Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• John Fox at Find A Grave

Martin Luther
Luther in 1533 by Lucas Cranach the Elder
Born	(1483-11-10)10 November 1483 Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Died	18 February 1546(1546-02-18) (aged 62) Eisleben, Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
Occupation	Monk, Priest, Theologian
Notable works	The Ninety-Five Theses, Luther's Large Catechism, Luther's Small Catechism, On the Freedom of a Christian
Spouse	Katharina von Bora
Children	Hans (Johannes), Elisabeth, Magdalena, Martin, Paul, Margarethe
Influences	Paul the Apostle, Augustine of Hippo
Influenced	Philipp Melanchthon, Lutheranism, John Calvin, Karl Barth
Signature

 Martin Luther (help·info) (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German monk, priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation.^[1] He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the Emperor.

Luther taught that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge^[2] and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood.^[3] Those who identify with Luther's teachings are called Lutherans.

His translation of the Bible into the vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation,^[4] and influenced the translation into English of the King James Bible.^[5] His hymns influenced the development of singing in churches.^[6] His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.^[7]

In his later years, while suffering from several illnesses and deteriorating health, Luther became increasingly antisemitic, writing that Jewish homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned, money confiscated and liberty curtailed. These statements have contributed to his controversial status.^[8]

Early life[link]

Birth and education[link]

Portraits of Hans and Margarethe Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1527

Martin Luther was born to Hans Luder (or Ludher, later Luther)^[9] and his wife Margarethe (née Lindemann) on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, Germany, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He was baptized as a Catholic the next morning on the feast day of St. Martin of Tours. His family moved to Mansfeld in 1484, where his father was a leaseholder of copper mines and smelters^[10] and served as one of four citizen representatives on the local council.^[9] The religious scholar Martin Marty describes Luther's mother as a hard-working woman of "trading-class stock and middling means" and notes that Luther's enemies would later wrongly describe her as a whore and bath attendant.^[9] He had several brothers and sisters, and is known to have been close to one of them, Jacob.^[11] Hans Luther was ambitious for himself and his family, and he was determined to see Martin, his eldest son, become a lawyer. He sent Martin to Latin schools in Mansfeld, then Magdeburg in 1497, where he attended a school operated by a lay group called the Brethren of the Common Life, and Eisenach in 1498.^[12] The three schools focused on the so-called "trivium": grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Luther later compared his education there to purgatory and hell.^[13]

In 1501, at the age of nineteen, he entered the University of Erfurt – which he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse.^[14] The schedule called for waking at four every morning for what has been described as "a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises."^[14] He received his master's degree in 1505.^[15]

In accordance with his father's wishes, Luther enrolled in law school at the same university that year but dropped out almost immediately, believing that law represented uncertainty.^[15] Luther sought assurances about life and was drawn to theology and philosophy, expressing particular interest in Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel.^[15] He was deeply influenced by two tutors, Bartholomaeus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter, who taught him to be suspicious of even the greatest thinkers^[15] and to test everything himself by experience.^[16] Philosophy proved to be unsatisfying, offering assurance about the use of reason but none about loving God, which to Luther was more important. Reason could not lead men to God, he felt, and he thereafter developed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle over the latter's emphasis on reason.^[16] For Luther, reason could be used to question men and institutions, but not God. Human beings could learn about God only through divine revelation, he believed, and Scripture therefore became increasingly important to him.^[16]

He later attributed his decision to an event: on 2 July 1505, he was on horseback during a thunderstorm and a lightning bolt struck near him as he was returning to university after a trip home. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!"^[17] He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left law school, sold his books, and entered a closed Augustinian friary in Erfurt on 17 July 1505.^[18] One friend blamed the decision on Luther's sadness over the deaths of two friends. Luther himself seemed saddened by the move. Those who attended a farewell supper walked him to the door of the Black Cloister. "This day you see me, and then, not ever again," he said.^[16] His father was furious over what he saw as a waste of Luther's education.^[19]

Martin Luther on glass in church of Martin Luther in Murska Sobota (Slovenia)

Monastic and academic life[link]

Luther as an Augustinian monk

Luther as an Augustinian monk

Luther dedicated himself to monastic life, devoting himself to fasting, long hours in prayer, pilgrimage, and frequent confession.^[20] He would later remark, "If anyone could have gained heaven as a monk, then I would indeed have been among them."^[21] Luther described this period of his life as one of deep spiritual despair. He said, "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul."^[22]

Johann von Staupitz, his superior, concluded that Luther needed more work to distract him from excessive introspection and ordered him to pursue an academic career. In 1507, he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1508 began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg.^[23] He received a Bachelor's degree in Biblical studies on 9 March 1508, and another Bachelor's degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard in 1509.^[24] On 19 October 1512, he was awarded his Doctor of Theology and, on 21 October 1512, was received into the senate of the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg, having been called to the position of Doctor in Bible.^[25] He spent the rest of his career in this position at the University of Wittenberg.

The start of the Reformation[link]

Door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg to which, by one account, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on 31 October 1517, sparking the Reformation.

In 1516, Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal commissioner for indulgences, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences to raise money to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.^[26] Roman Catholic theology stated that faith alone, whether fiduciary or dogmatic, cannot justify man;^[27] justification rather depends only on such faith as is active in charity and good works (fides caritate formata) can justify man.^[28] The benefits of good works could be obtained by donating money to the church.

On 31 October 1517, Luther wrote to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences," which came to be known as The Ninety-Five Theses. Hans Hillerbrand writes that Luther had no intention of confronting the church, but saw his disputation as a scholarly objection to church practices, and the tone of the writing is accordingly "searching, rather than doctrinaire."^[29] Hillerbrand writes that there is nevertheless an undercurrent of challenge in several of the theses, particularly in Thesis 86, which asks: "Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?"^[29]

Luther objected to a saying attributed to Johann Tetzel that "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory [also attested as 'into heaven'] springs."^[30]

He insisted that, since forgiveness was God's alone to grant, those who claimed that indulgences absolved buyers from all punishments and granted them salvation were in error. Christians, he said, must not slacken in following Christ on account of such false assurances.

However, this oft-quoted saying of Tetzel was by no means representative of the official Catholic teaching on indulgences, but rather, more a reflection of his capacity to exaggerate. Yet if Tetzel overstated the matter in regard to indulgences for the dead, his teaching on indulgences for the living was pure.^[31]

The sale of indulgences shown in A Question to a Mintmaker, woodcut by Jörg Breu the Elder of Augsburg, ca. 1530.

According to scholars Walter Krämer, Götz Trenkler, Gerhard Ritter and Gerhard Prause, the story of the posting on the door, even though it has settled as one of the pillars of history, has little foundation in truth.^[32][33][34] The story is based on comments made by Philipp Melanchthon, though it is thought that he was not in Wittenberg at the time.^[35]

It was not until January 1518 that friends of Luther translated the 95 Theses from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press.^[36] Within two weeks, copies of the theses had spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe.

Luther's writings circulated widely, reaching France, England, and Italy as early as 1519. Students thronged to Wittenberg to hear Luther speak. He published a short commentary on Galatians and his Work on the Psalms. This early part of Luther's career was one of his most creative and productive.^[37] Three of his best-known works were published in 1520: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom of a Christian.

Justification by faith[link]

From 1510 to 1520, Luther lectured on the Psalms, the books of Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians. As he studied these portions of the Bible, he came to view the use of terms such as penance and righteousness by the Catholic Church in new ways. He became convinced that the church was corrupt in its ways and had lost sight of what he saw as several of the central truths of Christianity. The most important for Luther was the doctrine of justification – God's act of declaring a sinner righteous – by faith alone through God's grace. He began to teach that salvation or redemption is a gift of God's grace, attainable only through faith in Jesus as the Messiah.^[38] "This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification," he wrote, "is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness."^[39]

Luther came to understand justification as entirely the work of God. This teaching by Luther was clearly expressed in his 1525 publication On the Bondage of the Will, which was written in response to On Free Will by Desiderius Erasmus (1524). Luther based his position on Predestination on St. Paul's epistle to the Ephesians 2:8–10. Against the teaching of his day that the righteous acts of believers are performed in cooperation with God, Luther wrote that Christians receive such righteousness entirely from outside themselves; that righteousness not only comes from Christ but actually is the righteousness of Christ, imputed to Christians (rather than infused into them) through faith.^[40] "That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law," he wrote. "Faith is that which brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ."^[41] Faith, for Luther, was a gift from God; the experience of being justified by faith was "as though I had been born again." His entry into Paradise, no less, was a discovery about "the righteousness of God" – a discovery that "the just person" of whom the Bible speaks (as in Romans 1:17) lives by faith.^[42] He explained his concept of "justification" in the Smalcald Articles:

The first and chief article is this: Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, died for our sins and was raised again for our justification (Romans 3:24–25). He alone is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), and God has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6). All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us ... Nothing of this article can be yielded or surrendered, even though heaven and earth and everything else falls (Mark 13:31).^[43]

Breach with the papacy[link]

Pope Leo X by Raphael

Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and Magdeburg did not reply to Luther's letter containing the 95 Theses. He had the theses checked for heresy and in December 1517 forwarded them to Rome.^[44] He needed the revenue from the indulgences to pay off a papal dispensation for his tenure of more than one bishopric. As Luther later noted, "the pope had a finger in the pie as well, because one half was to go to the building of St Peter's Church in Rome".^[45]

Pope Leo X was used to reformers and heretics,^[46] and he responded slowly, "with great care as is proper."^[47] Over the next three years he deployed a series of papal theologians and envoys against Luther, which served only to harden the reformer's anti-papal theology. First, the Dominican theologian Sylvester Mazzolini drafted a heresy case against Luther, whom Leo then summoned to Rome. The Elector Frederick persuaded the pope to have Luther examined at Augsburg, where the Imperial Diet was held.^[48] There, in October 1518, Luther informed the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan that he did not consider the papacy part of the biblical Church, and the hearings degenerated into a shouting match. More than his writing the 95 Theses, Luther's confrontation of the church cast him as an enemy of the pope.^[49] Cajetan's original instructions had been to arrest Luther if he failed to recant, but he lacked the means in Augsburg, where the Elector guaranteed Luther's security.^[50] Luther slipped out of the city at night, without leave from Cajetan.^[51]

The meeting of Martin Luther (right) and Cardinal Cajetan (left, before the book).

In January 1519, at Altenburg in Saxony, the papal nuncio Karl von Miltitz adopted a more conciliatory approach. Luther made certain concessions to the Saxon, who was a relative of the Elector, and promised to remain silent if his opponents did.^[52] The theologian Johann Maier von Eck, however, was determined to expose Luther's doctrine in a public forum. In June and July 1519, he staged a disputation with Luther's colleague Andreas Karlstadt at Leipzig and invited Luther to speak.^[53] Luther's boldest assertion in the debate was that Matthew 16:18 does not confer on popes the exclusive right to interpret scripture, and that therefore neither popes nor church councils were infallible.^[54] For this, Eck branded Luther a new Jan Hus, referring to the Czech reformer and heretic burned at the stake in 1415. From that moment, he devoted himself to Luther's defeat.^[55]

Excommunication[link]

On 15 June 1520, the Pope warned Luther with the papal bull (edict) Exsurge Domine that he risked excommunication unless he recanted 41 sentences drawn from his writings, including the 95 Theses, within 60 days. That autumn, Johann Eck proclaimed the bull in Meissen and other towns. Karl von Miltitz, a papal nuncio, attempted to broker a solution, but Luther, who had sent the Pope a copy of On the Freedom of a Christian in October, publicly set fire to the bull and decretals at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520,^[56] an act he defended in Why the Pope and his Recent Book are Burned and Assertions Concerning All Articles. As a consequence, Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X on 3 January 1521, in the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.

Diet of Worms[link]

"Luther Before the Diet of Worms." Photogravure based on the painting by Anton von Werner (1843–1915)

The enforcement of the ban on the 95 Theses fell to the secular authorities. On 18 April 1521, Luther appeared as ordered before the Diet of Worms. This was a general assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire that took place in Worms, a town on the Rhine. It was conducted from 28 January to 25 May 1521, with Emperor Charles V presiding. Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, obtained a safe conduct for Luther to and from the meeting.

Johann Eck, speaking on behalf of the Empire as assistant of the Archbishop of Trier, presented Luther with copies of his writings laid out on a table and asked him if the books were his, and whether he stood by their contents. Luther confirmed he was their author, but requested time to think about the answer to the second question. He prayed, consulted friends, and gave his response the next day:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.^[57]

Luther is sometimes also quoted as saying: "Here I stand. I can do no other". Recent scholars consider the evidence for these words to be unreliable, since they were inserted before "May God help me" only in later versions of the speech and not recorded in witness accounts of the proceedings.^[58]

Over the next five days, private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate. The Emperor presented the final draft of the Diet of Worms on 25 May 1521, declaring Luther an outlaw, banning his literature, and requiring his arrest: "We want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic."^[59] It also made it a crime for anyone in Germany to give Luther food or shelter. It permitted anyone to kill Luther without legal consequence.

At Wartburg Castle[link]

Wartburg Castle, Eisenach

Luther's disappearance during his return trip was planned. Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, had him intercepted on his way home by masked horsemen and escorted to the security of the Wartburg Castle at Eisenach.^[60] During his stay at Wartburg, which he referred to as "my Patmos",^[61] Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German and poured out doctrinal and polemical writings. These included a renewed attack on Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, whom he shamed into halting the sale of indulgences in his episcopates,^[62] and a "Refutation of the Argument of Latomus," in which he expounded the principle of justification to Jacobus Latomus, an orthodox theologian from Louvain.^[63]

In this work, one of his most emphatic statements on faith, he argued that every good work designed to attract God's favor is a sin.^[64] All humans are sinners by nature, he explained, and God's grace, which cannot be earned, alone can make them just. On 1 August 1521, Luther wrote to Melanchthon on the same theme: "Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides."^[65]

The Wartburg room where Luther translated the New Testament into German. An original first edition is kept in the case on the desk

In the summer of 1521, Luther widened his target from individual pieties like indulgences and pilgrimages to doctrines at the heart of Church practices. In On the Abrogation of the Private Mass, he condemned as idolatry the idea that the mass is a sacrifice, asserting instead that it is a gift, to be received with thanksgiving by the whole congregation.^[66] His essay On Confession, Whether the Pope has the Power to Require It rejected compulsory confession and encouraged private confession and absolution, since "every Christian is a confessor."^[67] In November, Luther wrote The Judgement of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows. He assured monks and nuns that they could break their vows without sin, because vows were an illegitimate and vain attempt to win salvation.^[68]

Luther made his pronouncements from Wartburg in the context of rapid developments at Wittenberg, of which he was kept fully informed. Andreas Karlstadt, supported by the ex-Augustinian Gabriel Zwilling, embarked on a radical programme of reform there in June 1521, exceeding anything envisaged by Luther. The reforms provoked disturbances, including a revolt by the Augustinian monks against their prior, the smashing of statues and images in churches, and denunciations of the magistracy. After secretly visiting Wittenberg in early December 1521, Luther wrote A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion.^[69] Wittenberg became even more volatile after Christmas when a band of visionary zealots, the so-called Zwickau prophets, arrived, preaching revolutionary doctrines such as the equality of man, adult baptism, and Christ's imminent return.^[70] When the town council asked Luther to return, he decided it was his duty to act.^[71]

Return to Wittenberg[link]

Title page and portrait in a 1581 edition of Luther's writings in German

Luther secretly returned to Wittenberg on 6 March 1522. "During my absence," he wrote to the Elector, "Satan has entered my sheepfold, and committed ravages which I cannot repair by writing, but only by my personal presence and living word."^[72] For eight days in Lent, beginning on Invocavit Sunday, 9 March, Luther preached eight sermons, which became known as the "Invocavit Sermons." In these sermons, he hammered home the primacy of core Christian values such as love, patience, charity, and freedom, and reminded the citizens to trust God's word rather than violence to bring about necessary change.^[73]

Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: "Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it." But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear.^[74]

The effect of Luther's intervention was immediate. After the sixth sermon, the Wittenberg jurist Jerome Schurf wrote to the elector: "Oh, what joy has Dr. Martin’s return spread among us! His words, through divine mercy, are bringing back every day misguided people into the way of the truth."^[74]

Luther next set about reversing or modifying the new church practices. By working alongside the authorities to restore public order, he signalled his reinvention as a conservative force within the Reformation.^[75] After banishing the Zwickau prophets, he now faced a battle against not only the established Church but also the radical reformers who threatened the new order by fomenting social unrest and violence.^[76]

Peasants' War[link]

16th century peasant rebels

Despite his victory in Wittenberg, Luther was unable to stifle radicalism further afield. Preachers such as Zwickau prophet Nicholas Storch and Thomas Müntzer helped instigate the German Peasants' War of 1524–25, during which many atrocities were committed, often in Luther's name. There had been revolts by the peasantry on a smaller scale since the 15th century.^[77] Luther's pamphlets against the Church and the hierarchy, often worded with "liberal" phraseology, now led many peasants to believe he would support an attack on the upper classes in general.^[78] Revolts broke out in Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia in 1524, even drawing support from disaffected nobles, many of whom were in debt. Gaining momentum under the leadership of radicals such as Müntzer in Thuringia and Michael Gaismair in Tyrol, the revolts turned into war.^[79]

Luther sympathised with some of the peasants' grievances, as he showed in his response to the Twelve Articles in May 1525, but he reminded the aggrieved to obey the temporal authorities.^[80] During a tour of Thuringia, he became enraged at the widespread burning of convents, monasteries, bishops’ palaces, and libraries. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, written on his return to Wittenberg, he gave his interpretation of the Gospel teaching on wealth, condemned the violence as the devil's work, and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs:

Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel ... For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul; and the gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who, of their own free will, do what the apostles and disciples did in Acts 4 [:32–37]. They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of Pilate and Herod—should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, want to make the goods of other men common, and keep their own for themselves. Fine Christians they are! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants. Their raving has gone beyond all measure.^[81]

Luther justified his opposition to the rebels on three grounds. First, in choosing violence over lawful submission to the secular government, they were ignoring Christ's counsel to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"; St. Paul had written in his epistle to the Romans 13:1–7 that all authorities are appointed by God and therefore should not be resisted. This reference from the Bible forms the foundation for the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings, or, in the German case, the divine right of the princes. Second, the violent actions of rebelling, robbing, and plundering placed the peasants "outside the law of God and Empire," so they deserved "death in body and soul, if only as highwaymen and murderers." Lastly, Luther charged the rebels with blasphemy for calling themselves "Christian brethren" and committing their sinful acts under the banner of the Gospel.^[82]

Without Luther's backing for the uprising, many rebels laid down their weapons; others felt betrayed. Their defeat by the Swabian League at the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, followed by Müntzer’s execution, brought the revolutionary stage of the Reformation to a close.^[83] Thereafter, radicalism found a refuge in the anabaptist movement and other sects, while Luther's Reformation flourished under the wing of the secular powers.^[84]

Marriage[link]

Katharina von Bora, Luther's wife, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1526

The Augusteum, Luther's residence in Wittenberg. September 2006.

Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, one of 12 nuns he had helped escape from the Nimbschen Cistercian convent in April 1523, when he arranged for them to be smuggled out in herring barrels.^[85] "Suddenly, and while I was occupied with far different thoughts," he wrote to Wenceslaus Link, "the Lord has plunged me into marriage."^[86] Katherina was 26 years old, Luther was 41 years old.

On 13 June 1525, the couple was engaged with Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Johannes Apel, Philipp Melanchthon and Lucas Cranach the Elder and his wife as witnesses.^[87] On the evening of the same day, the couple was married by Bugenhagen.^[87] The ceremonial walk to the church and the wedding banquet were left out, and were made up two weeks later on 27 June.^[87]

Some priests and former monks had already married, including Andreas Karlstadt and Justus Jonas, but Luther's wedding set the seal of approval on clerical marriage.^[88] He had long condemned vows of celibacy on Biblical grounds, but his decision to marry surprised many, not least Melanchthon, who called it reckless.^[89] Luther had written to George Spalatin on 30 November 1524, "I shall never take a wife, as I feel at present. Not that I am insensible to my flesh or sex (for I am neither wood nor stone); but my mind is averse to wedlock because I daily expect the death of a heretic."^[90] Before marrying, Luther had been living on the plainest food, and, as he admitted himself, his mildewed bed was not properly made for months at a time.^[91]

Luther and his wife moved into a former monastery, "The Black Cloister," a wedding present from the new elector John the Steadfast (1525–32). They embarked on what appeared to have been a happy and successful marriage, though money was often short.^[92] Between bearing six children, Hans – June 1526; Elizabeth – 10 December 1527, who died within a few months; Magdalene – 1529, who died in Luther's arms in 1542; Martin – 1531; Paul – January 1533; and Margaret – 1534. Katharina helped the couple earn a living by farming the land and taking in boarders.^[93] Luther confided to Michael Stiefel on 11 August 1526: "My Katie is in all things so obliging and pleasing to me that I would not exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus."^[94]