Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

With millions of copies in print, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has become a classic of magnificent courage and faith. This unparalleled volume chronicles the tragic yet triumphant stories of men and women who faced torture and martyrdom rather than deny their vision of truth and of God. Beginning with Jesus Christ, this exceptional historical record traces the roots of religious persecution through the sixteenth century. It examines the heroic lives of great men and women such as John Hus, John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Anne Askew, Lady Jane Grey, and Martin Luther. John Foxe also knew persecution. Forced to flee from his native England to Europe during Queen Mary’s severe persecution of those holding Reformed views, he carefully compiled records of martyred Christians. His writings possess a sense of immediacy and insight into suffering that few “objective” church historians can match.

From the Introduction
“When one recollects that until the appearance of the Pilgrim’s Progress the common people had almost no other reading matter except the Bible and Fox’s Book of Martyrs, we can understand the deep impression that this book produced; and how it served to mold the national character. Those who could read for themselves learned the full details of all the atrocities performed on the Protestant reformers; the illiterate could see the rude illustrations of the various instruments of torture, the rack, the gridiron, the boiling oil, and then the holy ones breathing out their souls amid the flames. Take a people just awakening to a new intellectual and religious life; let several generations of them, from childhood to old age, pore over such a book, and its stories become traditions as individual and almost as potent as songs and customs on a nation’s life.” — Douglas Campbell, “The Puritan in Holland, England, and America”

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (Fox’s Book of Martyrs)
A History of the Lives, Sufferings and Triumphant Deaths of the Early Christian and the Protestant Martyrs
• Author: John Foxe (or John Fox)
• Editor: William Byron Forbush
• Originally published in 1563 by John Day as “Actes and Monuments”