FOXE, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

[Foxe's Book of Martyrs:] Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happening in the Church, with an universall historie of the same. The masterpiece and monument of the English Reformation, an exhaustive and abundantly illustrated Protestant martyrology and anti-papist history of the church, of extraordinary influence for the following two centuries, "at once both the most important narrative source for the English Reformation and a work that helped to shape its later development" (ODNB). The work was first published in Latin in 1559 and in English in 1563. It was frequently reprinted afterwards, with revisions by Foxe and by editors following his death in 1587. "Acts and Monuments remained a living and evolving text long after Foxe was dead" (ibid.); this edition of 1610 (the sixth overall) brought the text up the time of King James and included a retelling of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The decades around this 1610 publication saw the pinnacle of the book's influence: "through the first half of the seventeenth century Acts and Monuments was not merely a remarkably popular book but was one of immense, almost unquestioned, authority. It was also a work of direct relevance to its readers on a range of theological, apologetic, homiletic, and even political issues of central concern" (ibid.)."'Foxe's Book of Martyrs', as it has been called ever since its first English publication, was for more than two centuries one of the most widely read books in Engl

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.