Neither Acts or Monuments

benedict s. robinson

Neither Acts Nor Monumentsenlr_1078 3..30

The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a tokenof the future.To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in thesame way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is alsoand in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It beginswith the printer.

—Jacques Derrida1

“The most striking structural aspect” of John Foxe’s Actes andMonumentes, Mark Breitenberg has written, is its “vast inclusion”

of seemingly heterogeneous materials, including letters, royal statutes,parliamentary acts, sermons, excerpts from medieval chronicles, tran-scripts of trials and depositions and interrogations, and so on.2 Thebook that circulates under the name “John Foxe” overwhelminglyconsists of other people’s words edited, arranged, and presented byFoxe, who appears less as the author of a historical narrative than as anearly obsessive collector of historical documents, the curator of anarchive of materials concerning the history of the English church.3 Theprinted book assembles in its pages the materials of a Protestantmemory, the “monuments” of its past: it assembles texts that are bothmarkers of past time and promises to the future, injunctions tomemory and to the continued labor of maintaining faith to the truechurch of Christ; and it understands those texts in their full materialityas documents, as textual objects to be rescued and collected.

David Scott Kastan introduced me to Foxe; his influence on this paper should be very clear. Anearly version of the argument was presented at a panel organized by Thomas Freeman at theSixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2003. Since then, it has developed thanks to insightfulresponses from Freeman, Zack Lesser, Alan Farmer, and the English Literary Renaissance readers.

1. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, tr. Eric Prenowitz (1995; Chicago, 1996), p. 18.2. “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s Acts and Monuments,” Renaissance and Reformation 25.4

(1989), 389.3. Patrick Collinson calls Foxe “a kind of registrar of original documents,” not a “narrative

historian,” in “Truth and Legend: the Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in Clio’s Mirror:Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (Zutphen, 1985),p. 34.

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Print enables the production of this archive, an archive that, in itstotality, has no real existence except in the pages of Foxe’s book. In this,the Actes and Monumentes responds to a felt absence in sixteenth-centuryEngland: the absence of a real repository of English historical texts.4 Theprinted book offers itself as a kind of ark of salvaged manuscripts. Andyet it also interposes a level of mediation between this archive of rescuedtexts and the reader, as the printed page both reproduces and displacesthe documents it transmits. The fact of print publication necessarilyseparates us from the manuscript archive even in the act of producing it.In a sense the sheer accumulation of documentary material in Actes andMonumentes conceals the book’s contrary impulse to disappear, to effaceitself, as the inevitable but unwanted intermediary between the readerand the archive: if in Derrida’s words “archivable meaning” is “codeter-mined by the structure that archives,” that is, by the printed page, it alsoremains possible to dream of something beyond the “ponderousarchiving machine” of print, an archive that erases itself “so as to let theorigin present itself . . . without mediation and without delay,”“withouteven the memory of a translation.”5

If we attend to its presentation of the manuscript document, we cancatch the Actes and Monumentes dreaming of such an unmediated,perfect archival reproduction. Recognizing a struggle between thebook’s archival impulse and the medium of its transmission also offersa corrective to one of the central dogmas of Reformation studies: thatProtestantism’s emphasis on the individual believer’s encounter withScripture fostered a triumphal affiliation with the new technology ofprint. At times the very conventionality of this claim produces whatlooks like a certain embarrassment about it: Jesse Lander calls it a“textbook truism,” Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, “some-thing of a cliché.”6 The Reformers themselves of course are partly

4. Foxe had access to a number of private collections, perhaps most notably those ofMatthew Parker and John Bale, on which see my article, “ ‘Darke speech’: Matthew Parker andthe Reforming of History,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29:4 (1998), 1064–66. See also TimothyGraham and Andrew G.Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documentsby John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, Eng., 1998); also theforthcoming book by Thomas S. Freeman and Elizabeth Evenden, Religion and the Book in EarlyModern England: The Making of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, Eng., 2011).

5. Derrida, pp. 8, 93.6. Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern

England (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), p. 6; Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, “John Foxe,John Day and the Printing of the ‘Book of Martyrs,’ ” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book

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responsible for this situation, since they proclaimed their own celebra-tory relationship with print. Thus, in a famous passage in the 1570edition of Actes and Monumentes, Foxe describes the invention of theprinting press as a providential act. “God opened the presse topreache,” he writes, “whose voyce the pope is neuer able to stoppewith all the puissance of his triple crown.”7 The Reformation, it seems,is a revolution of the book, a revolution that Foxe’s own monumentalbook both announces and embodies.

And yet for all of Foxe’s ringing assertion of the press’s function inspreading the gospel, he articulates that function through metaphors oforality. God has “opened” the press to “preache,” and now the popeseeks to silence this new “voyce.” By printing, “as by the gifte oftongues, . . . the Gospell soundeth to all nations & countreys vnderheauen.” The metaphors here seem to retract what the text asserts,reinscribing the printed word into the framework of the oral word, thesermon. Moreover, the comparison to “the gifte of tongues”—itselfhardly unproblematic—centers precisely on the inefficacy of reading inmatters of faith: “the holy Ghost speaketh to the aduersaries in innu-merable sortes of bookes, yet they will not be conuerted.”8 Themiraculous voice of the press seems destined to fall on deaf ears, unableto guarantee that it will find what Foxe calls “true disposed mindes.”9

In fact, the print market itself threatens to drown God’s word in a massof other words, the “infinite multitude of bookes” with which thepublic is “pestred”: “I doubt not, but many do both perceiue, &inwardly bewayle this insatiable boldness of many now a dayes, both inwrityng and printyng,” he states, “which to say the truth, for my partI do as much lament as any man els.” Foxe describes himself as “bothbashfull and fearefull” at the prospect of publishing, a combination ofembarrassment, anxiety, and discomfort that hardly speaks to an easyconfidence in the light brought into the world by print.10

Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and GilesMandelbrote (London, 2002), p. 23. Both do qualify the usual narrative. Cf. also Ian Green, Printand Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York, 2000), p. 1.

7. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5. Because the signatures of the various editionsdistinguish between upper- and lower-case—i.e., “Dd” precedes “DD”—I will write them outin full.

8. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5.9. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. [p]2.

10. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *3. See also Susan Felch,“Shaping the Reader in the Actsand Monuments,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), p. 59.

5Benedict S. Robinson


When Protestant doctrine insists on the necessity of the believer’sencounter with God’s word, the privileged mode of this encounteris not reading but listening, its medium not the book but thesermon. An image on the frontispiece of Foxe’s book that has severaltimes been interpreted as asserting the centrality of print to Protes-tantism thus tells a more complicated story. In the bottom left-handcorner of the page, a crowd of people gathers around a pulpit tolisten to a sermon. Three figures in the crowd are holding books. Inthis graphic representation of the community of belief, the bookreplaces the beads and icons so visibly held by the Catholic figuresin a parallel panel to the right. It seems to be an iconic represen-tation of a Protestant church defined by the shared hermeneuticlabor of receiving God’s word through the twin media of the pulpitand the press. But this image notably does not depict the scene ofsolitary reading so routinely conjured up by modern accounts ofProtestant scripturalism—as, for example, when Kevin Sharpe andSteven Zwicker discover, “at the core of Protestant doctrine,” “theindividual Christian struggling alone with faith and the word” in “aparticular and individual experience of the text.”11 The figures inFoxe’s image are decidedly not “struggling alone”: instead, the imagesituates the encounter with the book in the purview of the preachedword.12 Whatever reading may be taking place in this crowd ispresumably a kind of “reading along,” a practice in which the termsof the reading are being set by the preacher.13 Similarly, in main-stream Protestant theology, sola scriptura emphatically did not mean apurely individual reading but rather a reading with the congregation

11. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, “Introduction: discovering the Renaissancereader,” in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Sharpe and Zwicker,(Cambridge, Eng., 2003), p. 11.

12. On this image see Patrick Collinson, “The Coherence of the Text: How it HangethTogether: The Bible in Reformation England,” in The Bible, the Reformation, and the Church:Essays in Honour of James Atkinson, ed. W. P. Stephens (Sheffield, 1995), pp. 106–07, and PeterStallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early ModernEngland, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 63.

13. Of such scenes Stallybrass writes, on the contrary, that “the congregation is encouragedto bring their bibles to church and to check the preacher’s interpretation against their ownreading of the text” (Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” p. 63). And yet Protestant accounts ofscriptural reading often insist that reading is secondary to hearing the preached word: see D.F.McKenzie, “Speech-Manuscript-Print,” in New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Dave Oliphantand Robin Bradford (Austin, 1990), p. 91, and below. See also Alexandra Walsham, “ ‘DommePreachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past and Present168.1 (2000), 72–123.



in which private judgments were mediated by the community of thefaithful with its appointed ministers and guides.14 The doctrine ofsola scriptura is perfectly compatible with a real nervousness about apractice of reading in which the encounter with the text is exclu-sively an encounter with the silent, printed word, a solitary andpotentially wayward reading concretized in Foxe’s worry about “thesecrete iudgements of readers.”15

We can go still further and notice that the image’s most confidentdepiction of the transmission of God’s word takes place neither in thescene of reading nor in that of preaching, but in a tableau in the cornerin which a small group turns toward a blazing sun on which areinscribed the four letters of the tetragrammaton. Here we see theabsolute encounter with the name of God in a scene of reading thatrequires no book at all—a scene of reading that is also a not-reading,because those four letters do not call for interpretation but only forworship, and because those letters themselves signify the limits oflanguage, the inexpressibility of the divine, in the prohibition on fullywriting God’s name.16 The tetragrammaton marks the absolute cleav-age between the divine word and human language. But what is therelationship between this spiritualized depiction of a genuinely divinetransmission of the word and the rest of the image? Does it gloss forus what is happening in the crowd at the sermon, or among the readersin that crowd, or are these scenes of reception in tension, the oneidealizing, abstracting, and correcting the other? The more we studythe image, the less confident it seems about the means through whichGod’s word can be transmitted to the faithful.

A similar ambivalence marks the relations between print and manu-script throughout the Actes and Monumentes.To understand this book’srelationship to its own medium, we need to look beyond those few

14. Michael S. Harton, “Theologies of Scripture in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: An Introduction,” in Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed.Justin S. Holcomb (New York, 2006), p. 89: faithful reading “requires the Church as its propercontext and medium.” See also Felch, “Shaping the Reader,” pp. 56–57, 64; and Evelyn B.Tribble, Margins and Marginality:The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, 1993),pp. 36, 41.

15. Actes and Monumentes (1570) sig. *3. See Felch, “Shaping the Reader,” pp. 52–57; KevinSharpe, Reading Revolutions:The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000),p. 328; and Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality, pp. 7, 16, 24, 28.

16. See Ryan Netzley,“The End of Reading:The Practice and Possibility of Reading Foxe’sActes and Monuments,” ELH 73 (2006), 187, 209.



passages where Foxe explicitly addresses print and think instead aboutthe ways in which a relationship to print is structured into the veryform of the book on its every page. If we do so, we will recognize afundamental, structural fact of this book: that its real epistemologicalground lies not so much in the “diuine and miraculous” press, but inthe manuscript archive it seeks to bring into being.The incorporationof so many documents and transcripts remains one of the most crucialformal features of this book, one that testifies to a deep commitmentto the archive—or to an idea of the archive—as the evidentiary basisof the story it tells. Foxe and his collaborators manipulate the typo-graphical codes of the printed page in order to conjure the archive intoexistence on that page, constructing a visual and verbal rhetoric thatfunctions as though the page could be made transparent to the docu-ment, as though we could look through the veil of print into theimaginary archive underlying and underwriting it. In this way thearchive is both produced by the printed page and struggles against it:the Actes and Monumentes uses print against itself, to present the illusionof an unmediated access to the manuscript materials of English eccle-siastical history.17

It is tempting to think in terms of an ambivalence about print thatwe can attribute to Foxe himself; but this remains unknowable. TheActes and Monumentes was a massively collaborative project, involving anetwork of scholars, copyists, researchers, and informants.18 To writeabout the book is to write about this network, as well as about itspublisher John Day and all the people—compositors, printers, proof-readers, woodcut artists—who helped shape the book as we have it.Questions of typography and page layout in particular open up a realuncertainty about agency: although Elizabeth Evenden and ThomasFreeman have suggested that available manuscript evidence demon-strates Foxe’s “editorial control not just of the content but of thephysical layout of the page,” we clearly cannot think that all suchdecisions can be referred to Foxe—as Freeman himself has subse-

17. In this, the Actes and Monumentes bears comparison to other, more or less contemporaryefforts to amass, out of disparate documents, the materials of a comprehensive history: the workof Raphael Holinshed, or that of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, bears comparison withthat of Foxe in their encyclopedic tendencies and their documentary labor. And yet theproblems of a Protestant hermeneutics also mark Foxe’s project in very particular ways.

18. Devorah Greenberg,“Community of the Texts: Producing the First and Second Editionsof Acts and Monuments,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36.3 (2005), 695–715.



quently pointed out.19 Nor do we need to. My argument here does notrequire imagining that the features of the book I will discuss must bemotivated by the feelings of any single individual; rather, I take theevocation of such feelings to be a part of the way the book solicits thepsychic investments of its readers. What I hope to describe is some-thing structured into the whole project of the Actes and Monumentes,the necessary effect of an ambition to produce in print an archive ofmanuscript material relating to the history of religious persecution. Ifat times I write about Foxe—since this history regularly speaks in apersonal authorial voice, especially when discussing the work of col-lecting and compiling documents—I emphasize the structural aspectsof this relationship between the printed book and the manuscriptarchive. What I hope to reveal in this way is something fundamentalabout the book’s project, and what that in turn can tell us about thewider story of print and Protestantism.

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The archival document became a crucial issue in the polemical battlesthat followed the publication of the first English edition of Actes andMonumentes in 1563. The Catholic counterattack was significantlydirected against the book’s handling of evidence, charging Foxe withhaving distorted, manipulated, or falsified documents—as though, as hebitterly writes, “there were no histories els in all the world corrupted,but onely this story of Actes and Monumentes.”20 The history of suchcharges occupies the bulk of the 1570 dedication to Elizabeth in whichFoxe takes up a complex stance, at once acknowledging that the 1563edition contained errors, asserting that many of them were fixed in theprocess of proofreading the text, and challenging the motives of hisattackers in singling out these errors in the first place.21 In the struggleto provide English Protestantism with a genealogy, a long prehistoryextending all the way back to primitive Christianity, the possibility of

19. Evenden and Freeman, “John Foxe,” p. 39; Freeman, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and EarlyModern Print Culture (Review),” The Library 8.2 (2007), 198–203.

20. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *1v.21. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *1–*2.



error became a charged issue.The truth of this narrative was somethingto be fought over in its every detail.22

It is easy to think that the polemic about errors in the Actes andMonumentes willfully turns the discussion to minute particulars and failsto engage the book at the level of its larger claims; but I want tosuggest that the Catholic polemicists seized on something essential tothis project: the necessary contradiction of an archival impulse as ittranslates itself into print—the problem of mediation.This is a questionthat obsesses the book as well, motivating a continual emphasis on thevery real, concrete physicality of its documentary sources, on theirvulnerable materiality, and on the historiographical labor of finding,transcribing, and publishing them. Whenever he can, Foxe emphasizesthe autograph document underlying the printed page, as when heoffers us the “examinations” of Richard Woodman “written andpenned with his owne hande,” or those of Richard Crashefield “setforth and written with his owne hande,” or a letter of EdmundBonner’s “Out of Boners owne hande writing.”23 Behind the printedpage we have the handwritten document, the personal testimony. Attimes, he invites us to marvel at the fact that anything has survived tobe read at all. Offering the reader the letters of John Philpot, “penned& written with hys owne hand” while he was in prison, for example,Foxe writes that the letters have been “maruelously reserued” fromPhilpot’s “enemies,” who “sought not onely to stoppe him from allwryting, but also to spoile and depriue him of that which he hadwritten.” In a poignant scene we are told that, although Philpot “wasmany times stripped and searched,”“these hys wrytings were conueyedand hid in places about him,” and so were saved, although Philpot wasnot.24

This emphasis on the difficulty of the work of textual reclamationonly intensifies in those sections of the book dealing with the moredistant past. In one case Foxe observes that the signatures at the end ofa set of letters “thorowe the antiquitie” are “so blotted that they could

22. On the controversy over Foxe’s book, see Evenden and Freeman, “John Foxe,” pp.40–41; Glyn Parry, “John Foxe, ‘Father of Lyes,’ and the Papists,” in John Foxe and the EnglishReformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 295–305; and Ceri Sullivan,“ ‘Oppressed bythe Force of Truth’: Robert Persons Edits John Foxe,” in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed.David Loades (Brookfield, 1999), pp. 154–66.

23. Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. BBBB4, EEEE5r; 1570, EEE3.24. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig.YYYY2v.



not be red.”25 Of another text he writes that it appears to be “of an oldand auncient wryting, both by the forme of ye characters and by ye

wearing of ye Partchment, almost consumed by length of yeares andtyme.”26 The semi-legible, half-destroyed text is called upon to testifyto its truth through the very damage it has suffered. Even the lacunaeof the text constitute a kind of evidence of antiquity and authenticity,and so Foxe points them out, as when he notes in the margin of aletter written by Innocent III, “Some thyng lacketh here in ourcopy.”27 The difficulty of reading the document becomes a sign of itsvalue, as is suggested strikingly by the handling of a set of Anglo-Saxonmaterials as part of the history of transubstantiation. The point of thisdiscussion is to show that this doctrine had not been preached in theEnglish church since time immemorial, and that it was possible totrace a history through which it displaced earlier eucharistic doctrines.Foxe offers the documents of this history in both English and Anglo-Saxon, the latter in a font recently cast at Matthew Parker’s expense.28

The Anglo-Saxon was literally unreadable, for all but a few scholars, asis clear from the inclusion of an Anglo-Saxon alphabet at the head ofone of the documents; it seems doubtful that Foxe himself could readit.29 The Anglo-Saxon is included precisely for its visual strangeness, itsimmediately visible antiquity, which in itself constitutes a silent claimto truth.30

Age, the vulnerable physical condition of the text, and even itsillegibility become part of an archival rhetoric that enlists the fragilityand rarity of its manuscript sources as a prime index of their testa-mentary value.31 This is no doubt obvious to anyone who has spent

25. Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. S5v.26. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. MMM1v.27. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. M5v.28. See my “ ‘Darke Speech’,” 1061.29. Greenberg, “Community of the Texts,” 713.30. This Anglo-Saxon material is also one of the places where we can catch Foxe in all of

his tendentious willingness to distort history, emending his documents in order to make themconform more closely to the story he wants to tell. See John Bromwich, “The First BookPrinted in Anglo-Saxon Types,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society 2 (1959–63),265–91, and my essay, “John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons,” in John Foxe and His World, ed.Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 54–72. On the question ofdocumentary truth in the Actes and Monumentes, see below.

31. Even in the case of texts set from prior printed versions, Foxe labors to present a historyof transmission through which the printed text nevertheless maintains its connection with amanuscript exemplar. Of a work by William Thorpe, for example, he notes that he has taken his



time with the Actes and Monumentes, and yet it seems worth pausingover, for the emphasis on the document as a physical thing, an object,and not simply a text to be quoted. In this attentiveness to the physicalbeing of its sources, the Actes and Monumentes reveals a feeling for thefragility of paper and ink, for the vulnerability of the textual object.The labor of scholarly research among the “monuments” of antiquitycontinually intrudes into the narrative, even becoming itself evidenceof the operation of providence. Of the letter from Innocent III citedearlier, for example, Foxe writes that the “copy . . . by chaunce, yea notby chaunce but by the oportune sendyng of God, came to my handes,as I was pennyng this present story, writen in the end of an oldparchment boke, & otherwise rare I suppose to be founde.”32 Theprocess of research has become a part of this history, the scholar’sdiscovery a message from God. The fragility of these textual objectsevokes the intolerable but very real possibility that God’s message willbe lost through the callousness of a humanity that fails to preserve andtreasure these fragments and signs of God’s care. The Actes and Monu-mentes solicits a kind of scholar’s pathos, an impulse to preserve whatis threatened by loss.

This concern for the document as an object whose vulnerability isa significant part of its value and meaning motivates a typographicallabor to make the manuscript document visible on the printed page.33

When the Actes and Monumentes includes letters, proclamations, stat-utes, sermons, or trial transcripts, those materials are marked off fromthe rest of the text through a series of varying typographical codes,often including the use of spacing, titles, “pilcrows,” and changes oftypeface or font.34 This, too, is something undoubtedly so familiar toFoxe scholars that no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to say muchabout it. All of these typographical signals serve to guide the readerthrough the massive labyrinth of this book; but above all they work to

text from a transcript published by William Tyndale, writing that “though the saide MaisterTindall did somwhat amend” Thorpe’s English “and frame it after our maner,” this work ofmodernization was not fully accomplished “in all wordes,” so that “some thing dooth remaine,sauering the old speeche of that time.” See Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. O6; for Tyndale’sedition, see The examinacion of Master William Thorpe (Antwerp, 1530).

32. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. M5.33. On typography and the relationship between print, manuscript, and speech, see McK-

enzie, “Speech-Manuscript-Print,” pp. 101, 108.34. On the pilcrow, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in

Early Modern England (Chicago, 2001), p. 117.



separate the document on the page, graphically producing it as anobject distinct from the surrounding text. The layout of Foxe’s “wildtypographic page” is undoubtedly a part of the meaning of the Actesand Monumentes, part of its significance as an expressive form, in D.F.McKenzie’s famous phrase.35 Of course this does not mean that everytypographical feature is susceptible to interpretation; there are clearlyquotidian pressures of space, for example, that shape decisions aboutlayout. Nevertheless, the broad patterns of typography and layoutsuggest a sustained thinking about the document, its translation ontothe printed page, and the problems produced by that process oftranslation—whether that thinking can finally be ascribed to Foxehimself, to John Day, the book’s compositors, or to some collaborationof all of these people, in the effort to salvage and disseminate thematerials of English Protestant history.

In the 1563 edition, for example, Latin documents are generally setacross both columns of the page, so that they interrupt the normalexperience of reading, the normal movement of the eye along eachcolumn successively.This interruption forces a kind of attention to theLatin text as something obeying its own, distinct logic; in effect,separate spatial rules govern the Latin text and the rest of the page (3c5v). The immediate impression is of the Latin document as a distinctobject, an integral, whole thing in its own right. Absent the divisioninto columns that is the governing structure of the page, we seem tobe invited not simply to read the letter but to see it, as though it werephysically there before us.36 Visibility is, in fact, the primary languagethrough which Foxe presents the document: he continually writes ofshowing or exhibiting the document, of “inserting” it into the book, as

35. Netzley, “The End of Reading,” 203; D. F. McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: TheCase of William Congreve,” in Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. PeterD. McDonald and Michael K. Suarez (Amherst, 2002), pp. 198–236, and Bibliography and theSociology of Texts (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), pp. 9–29. See also Evelyn B. Tribble, “The PeopledPage: Polemic, Confutation, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print,and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 109–22, andDavid Scott Kastan, “ ‘The noyse of the new Bible’: Reform and Reaction in HenricianEngland,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and DeboraShuger (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 46–68.

36. On this practice, see also John King, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the History of theBook,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.2 (2004), 175–76. King argues that this signals a“hybridization” of the page formats of vernacular and humanist books, and thus suggests a kindof fusing of vernacular and elite readerships, an argument he also extends to the use of blackletter and italic or roman fonts (pp. 178, 180).



though the thing itself were here present.37 The choice to print bothLatin and English versions of such documents suggests this desire tomake the documentary original present on the page as a kind of thing.The first version of Actes and Monumentes, after all, was entirely inLatin; the decision to produce the 1563 edition and all subsequenteditions in English was motivated by the concern to discover a widervernacular readership. In the English Actes and Monumentes, the Latin—like the Anglo-Saxon—appears alongside its translation as proof ofFoxe’s fidelity for those who can read the evidence; but for thevernacular reader who is the particular target of this book, the Latinnecessarily appears as a kind of mute testimony, an illegible text that inits very illegibility becomes a thing to be looked at.

The 1570 edition develops its own repertoire of visual and typo-graphical codes for marking its documents, including spacing, titles,pilcrows, lines of quotation marks in the margin, and—increasingly—the use of distinct typefaces or fonts.38 While its procedures are lessregular than those of the 1563 edition, it looks as though the 1570edition becomes increasingly concerned with the use of typographyand layout to mark off the document, and that this concern for thehandling of the document is still further extended in the 1583 edition,which significantly stabilizes its documentary typography. For example,in the case of two letters, one from Edward VI and one from the Earlof Warwick, concerning whether John Hooper should be allowed totake a bishopric without conforming in regard to clerical vestmentsand certain other ceremonial usages, the 1570 edition sets both in asmaller typeface, in blocks of text separated by a space from whatprecedes and follows them; both begin with drop capitals; and both arelaid out on the page so as visually to recall the layout of a letter, withthe signature lines set against the right margin. The first of the twoletters is further introduced with a heading—in roman—along with apilcrow indicating the commencement of something new. A marginal

37. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. HHHh2v (“as by the reading thereof thou mayest seeand perceaue more at large”); (1570), sig. B1v (“let euerye man iudge, which seeth this letter”), sig.L4v (“which letter, as he wrote the same, here vnder followeth to be seene”), sig. MMM2 (“thisLatine epistle aboue exhibited,” “inserted”), and sig. ZZZ4 (“as it came newly to our hands, Ithought here to exhibite vnto ye world”).

38. There are a few cases in which the 1570 text reverts to the 1563 edition’s practice ofpresenting material across both columns; see, e.g., sigs. TTt2 and LL2v. But generally thisbecomes a practice for marking rhetorically significant moments of Foxe’s own narrative, not away of presenting documents.



notation identifying the letter and a column of quotation marks appearin the left margin (4R lv). The 1583 edition retains many of thesefeatures, but in addition sets both letters in roman type, underscoringtheir difference from the black-letter text of the rest of the page(4S 4).39

Letters generally provide the best evidence of this typographicalsolicitude for the document: through the use of white space, layout,and font or typeface changes, they are often presented with a carefulattention to their graphic elements. One of the more remarkablefeatures of the reproduced letter is the signature line, which is often setat the right margin, presumably imitating the spatial organization of themanuscript letter itself; the signature is thus a prime indicator ofthe effort visually or graphically to imitate the physical document.But the inclusion of a printed signature raises with striking claritythe whole problem of print mediation: the most personal kind ofscript, the signed name that authorizes the whole document—“I.Warwike”—is subjected to the regularizing anonymity of print.Nowhere is the chasm between print and manuscript more evident.The very point of authorization, the point where the writing self signsitself—and thus the point that the Actes and Monumentes most wants tocapture—escapes it even in the moment of reproduction.The pathos ofthis can be seen in the case of a letter sent by Heinrich Bullinger toJohn Hooper, now in prison under Queen Mary, and signed, “Youknow the hand, H.B.”40 The allusion to the familiarity of a knownhandwriting evokes the concrete, physical being of this piece of textand the intimacy of an exchange of personal letters: a concreteness andan intimacy that, like Bullinger’s “hand” itself, are necessarily missingfrom the printed page.

Perhaps the most visually striking use of typography to mark adocument appears near the beginning of the second volume of the1570 edition, when a letter written from an Italian martyr to “his mostdearely beloued brethren” is presented enclosed within an elaborate typeborder. While unique, this moment nevertheless emblematizes theconcerns of this typography: it is a question, here very clearly, of theedges of the text, of its borders, of an attention to the boundary that

39. On the changing meanings of typefaces in the late sixteenth century, see Mark Bland,“The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,” TEXT 11 (1998), 93–107.

40. Actes and Monumentes (1583), sig. 4T 5.



enables the presentation of the document as a distinct and integralthing. It is as though the printed page were a kind of opening ontosomething else altogether, a “monument” of antiquity conceived in itsfull being as a textual object, vulnerable to loss but here rescued anddisseminated to a print readership.

In all of these distinct ways the various editions reveal an attentive-ness to the document as a material object and seek to give place to thatobject on the printed page. But Foxe is actually quite cagey in thepromises he makes when he describes the textual relationship of hisreproduced documents to their exemplars. Most commonly, he offersthe “tenor” or the “effecte” of a particular text, words that suggestfidelity to the text’s general meaning, but not to its exact words.41 Atother times he promises the “forme and tenor” or the “forme andeffecte,” a phrasing that suggests a more sustained faithfulness; still morerarely, he claims to offer the document “worde for worde.”42 Thedistinction between “forme” and “tenor” perhaps corresponds to some-thing like a distinction between the general drift or substance of a textand the particulars of its manifestation as a document. It is clearly notpossible to press this language for anything like a theory of editing, butI am tempted to compare Foxe’s notion of “forme” to W.W. Greg’sconcept of “accidentals,” all of those non-substantive markers that canfreely be emended by an editor without impairing the real meaning ofthe text: all those elements that Greg imagined as contributing to thetext’s “formal presentation.”43 The concept of “forme” in the Actes andMonumentes seems to signify all of the features of the text as a materialdocument, from handwriting to the shapes of the letters to the archaicsyntactical and lexical features of the language to the condition of thepaper and the ink.While it does not contribute to the overall meaningof the document, “forme” is everything that nevertheless marks it orsigns it as an historically embedded object.As such,“forme” is for Foxeat once dispensable and absolutely essential. It does not participate inthe substantive content of the text, but it identifies that text as a“monument” of antiquity and thus validates its evidentiary value.WhenFoxe claims to have copied his documents from autograph manuscripts

41. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. f4, p2, q1.42. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. v3, Qq6 (“forme and tenor,”“forme and tenour”), sig.

x6 (“forme and effecte”), sig. Ss3v (“worde for worde”), and sig. Qq6 and Qq6v (“word byword”).

43. W.W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–51), 21.



written in “the old speeche of that time,” when he describes thephysical condition of those manuscripts, the barely legible writingcontained in them, or the ancient English in which they appear, hetestifies to a value that he locates in the “forme” of the document asa document, a value that has nothing to do with its meaning butconcerns its outer, material existence, its thingness.44

This of course is exactly what print can never transmit: the docu-ment as document is precisely what is lost, and this dilemma is whatmotivates Foxe’s frequent descriptions of the physical condition of hisdocumentary sources.The problem of print mediation can be traced inwhat is certainly the keyword of the archival vocabulary of the Actesand Monumentes, “copy.” The book constantly offers its readers the“copy” of a given document, using that word in its most relevantmeaning of “transcript,” reproduction.45 In this sense the word signalsthe distance of the printed text from the manuscript original, perhapsevoking a process of textual transmission with several stages, includingthe labor of copying the text by hand, inserting it into a manuscriptnarrative, and finally the printer’s work of setting that narrative intotype. Between the printed text and the originary source, in otherwords, obtrude other, more shadowy objects such as the transcript, thenotebook, or the manuscript prepared for the press.46

But “copy” is a word that can bear seemingly antithetical inter-pretations. It could mean any kind of imitation, and as such evokeda wide range of mimetic and artistic practices, including—by way ofits Latin root copia—the techniques of humanist rhetoric, with theirbasis in artful expansion. Through idiomatic expressions such as “tochange one’s copy” or to “copy a countenance,” the word foldedinto itself a whole early modern epistemological suspicion ofmimesis, opening up the possibility of distortion, pretense, lying, thecirculation of fraudulent or corrupted copies such as the “stolne, andsurreptitious copies” of Shakespeare’s plays famously condemned byHeminge and Condell in the First Folio.47 But at the same time,

44. Actes and Monumentes (1563) sig. O6.45. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. g2, t6, Qq6v.46. Substantial collections of Foxe’s manuscripts remain; see Thomas S. Freeman’s ODNB

(2004) entry, “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” subsection entitled “Samuel Foxe and his father’spapers.” See also Ralph Hanna, “An Oxford Library Interlude: The Manuscripts of John Foxethe Martyrologist,” Bodleian Library Record 17.5 (2002), 314–26, and Collinson, “Truth andLegend,” pp. 35, 51n. 30.

47. Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), sig. A3.



“copy” could also mean “original,” not the copy but the thingcopied: this is what it would have meant in John Day’s shop, wherethe “copy” would have been the manuscript that was being set intoprint or—by abstraction—the exclusive legal right to publish thatmanuscript, as formalized by an entry in the Stationers’ Register.Foxe repeatedly uses “copy” to designate his manuscript originals, asfor example when he tells us that he discovered “The copye” of apapal bull “in an olde written monument,” or when he claims toquote from “the copie of Boners owne letters by his owne handwriting, which I haue to shewe,” or when he judges the age of adocument by the condition of “the copie.”48 In all of these cases the“copy” is precisely the manuscript, the thing that Foxe or one of hiscorrespondents has perhaps “copied” in a transcript that has in turnserved as “copy” in Day’s print shop before being presented in theprinted pages of the Actes and Monumentes as the “copy” of an olddocument. What is Foxe claiming to give us, when he gives us“copies”? How close to the source is he promising to bring us? Theword he uses to present his documents can be used to designateevery single stage of their transmission into print, and as suchcontains in miniature the whole paradox of his project.

iii

The problem of mediation is evoked even in the title by which thisbook is generally known, Actes and Monumentes. The “Actes” here arethe acts of the martyrs whose lives and deaths the book narrates, actsthat testify to a true church of the faithful existing in unbrokencontinuity from the Roman persecutions right through to the latemedieval heretics and the early modern Protestants who claimed theirlegacy—a church none the less true for having no material, institu-tional reality except as instantiated in those acts. Foxe is intensely awareof the paradoxes of trying to write a church history without a “visible”church, that is, the effort to write a church history based only on thescattered and ephemeral experiences of the elect, a church history

48. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs.Vv6v, EEE4 (marginal note), MMM2. On the word“copy” and its idiomatic uses, see OED; also, Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print andKnowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2000), p. 105.



founded on events and not on institutions.49 That awareness producesan odd rhetorical balancing act on the question of the true church’s“visibility.” The book’s whole project would seem to be an effort tomake that church visible, to bring it into the light, to show its historyand to testify to its truth. Recent discussions of the iconicity of thephysical Actes and Monumentes have emphasized precisely this strivingfor a monumental visibility.50 But such “visibility” is also tainted by thelegacy of the Catholic past. For the early Reformers, “visibility” in thesense of embodied institutional existence slides easily into an idolatrousor fetishistic attachment to things. If the Catholic church has been theonly visible Christian church for over a thousand years, that visibilitysignifies for Foxe a diabolical commitment to gaudy shows, to cer-emonies, and to wealth and power.

Against the visibility of the Catholic church, Foxe imagines thetrue church as something spectral, a ghostly presence in the world.Most people, he writes, “beholding the Church of Rome to be sovisible and glorious in the eyes of the world, so shinyng in outwardbeauty,” have “supposed the same to be onely the right Catholickemother.” The church of the martyrs, “because it was not so visiblyknowne in the worlde,” was disregarded. And yet, “although theright Church of God be not so inuisible in the world, that none cansee it: yet neither is it so visible agayne that euery worldly eye mayperceaue it. For like as is the nature of truth: so is the propercondition of the true Church, that commonly none seeth it, butsuch only as be the members and partakers therof” ([p]3). In thisspectral ecclesiology the true church seems to flicker in and out ofexistence, or to leave only shadowy traces in the world, traces thatcan only be recognized by “true disposed mindes” ([p]2). Everythingseems to depend on a metaphorics of seeing, testifying, and witness-ing, which brings the history of the true church into the light of dayand convicts the Catholic church of offering only a specious exter-nality. The book offers us the “Actes” of its martyrs, acts that arethemselves testimonies, witnesses of the true church. The word“martyr” means witness, and the acts of these martyrs both testify tothe reality of the true faith and invite us to witness that reality, to

49. Susan Felch writes that “the true reader can see in the pages of Acts and Monuments theinvisible Church made visible” (“Shaping the Reader,” p. 61).

50. Breitenberg,“The Flesh Made Word”; Kastan,“Little Foxes,” in John Foxe and His World,pp. 117–32, and “Size Matters,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), 149–53.



see it bodied forth in their mutilated bodies, which—even as literallymade visible in the book’s woodcuts—become in effect surrogatesfor the physical continuity, the physical and material being, of theinstituted and “visible” Catholic church. But in basing his churchhistory on the acts of martyrs, Foxe opts for a paradoxical kind ofvisibility. After all, the acts he chronicles are acts of oblivion, disap-pearances, deaths. What Foxe narrates over and over is the calmacceptance of a violent dissolution of the self, a willing abandonmentof the world, an embrace of spiritual power in the experience oftotal worldly disempowerment. We are invited to see, but what weare invited to see are ghosts.

The shadowiness of such “Actes” promises to be stabilized in Foxe’stitle by the offer of “Monumentes,” a word Foxe uses in much thesame way as Spenser uses the word “moniments,” in Book II ofThe Faerie Queene.51 Monuments are records, histories, testimonies ofpast time, but also—particularly by way of Spenser’s spelling—“admonishments,” reminders of the labor we must undertake in thepresent to remain faithful to the past and to realize its promise for thefuture.They are also records imagined in their full materiality as papers,books, objects vulnerable to the depredations of time. When, in theHouse of Alma, Guyon discovers “An auncient booke, hight Britonmoniments,” he finds that book in Eumnestes’ room, the room ofmemory, “ruinous and old,” its primary occupant “all decrepit in hisfeeble corse” and yet with “liuely vigour . . . in his mind”:

This man of infinite remembrance was,And things foregone through many ages held,Which he recorded still, as they did pas,Ne suffred them to perish through long eld,As all things else, the which this world doth weld,But laid them vp in his immortall scrine.52

Despite the assertion of a perfect act of recording without loss, aperfect treasuring up of the past in this “immortall scrine,” the passageis suffused with the awareness of historical loss, of change, of passingtime, of the death of “all things.” Significantly, the passage takes place

51. On the word “monument,” see James Kearney, “Enshrining Idolatry in The FaerieQueene,” English Literary Renaissance 32.1 (2002), 5.

52. The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London, 1977), II.ix.59, 55, 56.



within Spenser’s extended allegory of the body: the problem of themateriality of the text is also the problem of human embodiment, ofmortality, sickness, weakness, passion. This awareness of physical vul-nerability extends from Eumnestes’ decrepit body to the equallydecayed bodies of the records he treasures:

His chamber all was hangd about with rolles,And old records from auncient times deriu’d,Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolles,

That were all worme-eaten, and full of canker holes. (II.ix.57)

Such “moniments,” it is clear, are thoroughly vulnerable to the fate of allother things, to the erosions and depredations of time, to the threat ofphysical destruction and loss. If the “monument” promises to preservethe past for memory—if it offers itself, in effect, as a kind of tombmarking and celebrating past history—there is yet no guarantee of itsown survival, no guarantee of its successful transmission into the future.

Like Guyon, Foxe can claim to have rescued the acts of the past forhistorical memory. He has not merely entered Eumnestes’ room, he hasdone Eumnestes’ work, searching for and collecting these “rolles” and“old records” in order to preserve them in his “scrine”—a word that, inits meaning as “reliquary,” a treasure chest for sacred fragments, evokes aconnection to both the divine and to death, to the tomb, to the fragmentmiraculously rescued from mortality and physical dissolution.53 The“monument” is also a memorial or a relic.At the end of the letter to thereader prefacing the 1570 edition, Foxe refers to the “admiration, andalmost superstition” with which “not onely the memory, but also thereliques” of the earliest martyrs “were receiued and kept amongest theauncient Christians.” Despite that phrase “almost superstition” with itsremarkably muted anxiety about the veneration of relics, we are clearlybeing invited to compare the work of collecting “monuments” with thistreasuring up of the physical remains of martyred bodies.Almost a pageof text passes before Foxe remembers to insist on the difference betweenhis saints and Catholic ones.54

Unlike either Guyon or Eumnestes, Foxe can also claim to havesalvaged these memorials for a wide readership, thereby enabling count-

53. OED, “scrine”; note particularly the citation from 1648, “a Skrine, or a Coffin.”54. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *3v: “though we repute not their ashes, chaynes, and

swerdes in the stede of reliques: yet let vs yelde thus much vnto theyr commemoration, toglorify the Lord in his Saintes, and imitate their death (as much as we may) with like constancy,or theyr lyues at the least with like innocency.”



less further scenes of reception, interpretation, and instruction. But thebook tells less than the truth when it promises both “Actes and Monu-mentes,” because we as readers can only access those acts as“Monumentes”—that is, as documents, chronicles, court records, every-thing that Foxe and his collaborators have sifted for evidence of thesemi-visible, semi-occulted church of the persecuted martyrs.The acts,as acts, are lost.What is visible to the reader, what remains, is only thebook and the “monuments” it transmits, the documents Foxe promisesto “exhibite.”55 What this means is that, unlike Guyon, we as readerscannot ourselves enter the historical archive, cannot open Eumnestes’scrine, cannot come into direct contact with the relics of the past, butwill receive those relics only in the form transmitted to us by the printedpage.The archive comes into being only in the pages of the book. In thisfurther sense, then, the book really offers neither acts nor monuments,but printed redactions and imitations, the “forme” or “tenor” of docu-ments that are themselves necessarily absent.The history of martyrdom,of witnessing, is present here only in facsimile, as testimonies of testi-monies of testimonies. If the book offers us the acts of the faithfulmartyrs, its title cannot disguise the fact that it can give us those acts onlyat third-hand.The book centers on the scene of witnessing, on martyr-dom as a making-present of the faith, and it labors to make the docu-ments of that scene visibly present in its pages; and yet the more wethink about it, the more the question of witnessing opens recursively,obtruding layers of distance and mediation between the reader and thescene of faith.

iv

One of the fundamental paradoxes of reading Actes and Monumentes, asRyan Netzley has argued, is that it produces endless evidence for itsclaims about church history while also insisting that no amount ofevidentiary verification can convince the reader who has not alreadyaccepted the truth of its narrative.56 The document seems to be the

55. See Breitenberg, “ ‘The Flesh Made Word,’ ” 396: “By a variety of narrative strategies,Foxe seeks to collapse the inevitable mediation between the event and its textual depiction”;Foxe wants “to reproduce the original event.”

56. As Netzley writes in “The End of Reading,”“The Acts and Monuments seeks to includeall evidence of Protestant and proto-Protestant martyrdom, but simultaneously acknowledges theimpossibility and irrelevance of such a goal” (204). Thomas Freeman has expressed skepticism



evidentiary foundation of this narrative, but it is a very problematic kindof foundation: literally absent from the page of the printed book;threatened by loss or its own unintelligibility; and perhaps worst of all,unable clearly to speak its own truth. For centuries the Catholic churchhad maintained control over the institutional means for writing andrecording history. In large measure it had both created and controlledthe archive. To read the records preserved in that archive requires themodern reader who would access them in their truth to engage in agenuine reading against the grain: “albeit the wordes of the statutethere,” as Foxe writes in the case of a document from the reign of HenryIV, “through corruption of that time” call certain individuals “false andperuerse preachers,”“yet notwithstanding whosoeuer readeth historyes andconferreth the order and descent of times, shall vnderstand these to beno false teachers, but faithfull witnesses of the truth.”57 Of the charge oftreason against Lord Cobham, Foxe acknowledges that to “the simplereader” its words may seem difficult or troubling, yet insists that he doesnot fear to “produce” those words “out of the recordes . . . as theystand,” because the “true harted reader” will perceive here “the craftyhandling of the aduersaries.”58 A reading that takes into account “theorder and descent of times”promises to rescue truth in the face of deceitby inverting the terms of its text, substituting “faithful” for “faithless,”“martyr” for “heretic,” “loyal subject” for “traitor.”

Foxe therefore insists on the difference between “simple” and “trueharted” readers, the former taking the words as they find them, and thelatter understanding the more difficult hermeneutic operation requiredbefore the real sense of the document can be made plain. A kind oftheology of election governs this hermeneutics, so that only those whoalready believe can in fact interpret properly. It is not the documentthat supports the largest claims of the narrative, but rather the totalnarrative that supports and authorizes the reading of any particulardocument.The document is interpreted so as to bring it into line withan already-totalized understanding of history, in a procedure that nec-essarily feels itself free to “emend” those aspects of the text that stray

about this reading, noting that the prefatory material of Foxe’s book seems to suggest, to thecontrary, the efficacy of historical documentation and argument in convincing its readers(personal communication).

57. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. [p]4.58. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. Nn6.



from the point it should be making. For Foxe, such emendation islicensed by a rhetoric according to which Catholicism itself is some-thing forged and corrupted, a false copy of the true church that has inturn engaged in rampant textual forgery and misprision: “except it bethe bookes onely of the newe Testament, & of the old, what is almostin the popes church, but either it is mingled or depraued, or altered, orcorrupted, eyther by some additions interlased, or by some diminutionmangled and gelded, or by some glose adulterate, or with manifest lyescontiminate.”59 Given this sense of the textual condition of his manu-script materials, it is surely no surprise that we can at times catch Foxeor his collaborators tendentiously editing their sources—or as theymight put it, repairing the damage done by centuries of Catholiccorruption. Here, Foxe’s notion of veracity collides with our own:where for modern historians, documentary truth consists in the faithfulreproduction of an original textual object, in the Actes and Monumentesfidelity is a matter of harmonizing the claims of the document withthe claims of a providential narrative that necessarily take precedence.60

The evidentiary status of this narrative recedes, just as the scene ofwitnessing itself recedes, behind layers of mediation that complicate oreven belie the promise to make present the scene of martyrdom, to offera true witnessing. Seen from this perspective, there seems to be some-thing peculiarly contradictory, even compulsive, about the decision toproduce such an enormous book, such a vast collection of evidence, asif we are dealing here with an effort to fill by sheer reiteration, evensheer physical mass, a space that cannot be filled.61 The very size of thebook seems like an effort to make visible the ghostly true church, to

59. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. Oo6.60. See, e.g., Collinson, “Truth and Legend,” which argues that Foxe’s distortions are

accomplished through “the presentation and interpretation of evidence” (p. 35) and through“omission and deliberate exclusion” (p. 36); he shapes the material to hand, but does not freelyinvent. See also Thomas Freeman, “Texts, Lies, and Microfilm: Reading and Misreading Foxe’s‘Book of Martyrs,’ ” Sixteenth Century Journal 30.1 (1999), 40.

61. According to Kastan, “Little Foxes,” William Turner pleaded with Foxe to reduce thesize, and therefore the cost, of the 1563 edition so that ordinary readers could afford it.Turner’starget price was ten shillings (p. 120). Foxe did the opposite. Peter Blayney calculates that the1570 edition would have retailed for between twenty-four and thirty shillings, up to three timesthe price Turner names. See “John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was,” in Material London,ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 331; also Julian Roberts, “Bibliographical Aspectsof John Foxe,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. Loades, p. 48; Evenden and Freeman,Religion and the Book; and Kastan,“Size Matters,” p. 149.The book was so large that it seems JohnDay underestimated the amount of paper it required by as much as 10%, forcing him to use



bring it into the light in full, physical being; and yet Foxe’s hermeneuticseems to acknowledge the impossibility of any such effort.

While clearly aimed at the particular problems of this project, thishermeneutic also draws on the paradoxes of a Protestant scripturalism.Far from simply encouraging the faithful to cultivate an intimaterelationship with the text, sola scriptura opens up real philosophicalproblems centering on the act of reading and on the status of the text.In Protestant theology Scripture is the only true source of a contactwith the divine that has been withdrawn from the Catholic tradition,from the institution of the church, and from physical practices liketelling beads, going on pilgrimage, and offering prayers for the dead.“Take away the word,” Calvin writes, “and no faith will remain.”62

Scripture is also, according to the claims regularly made for it, perfectlyself-authenticating and perfectly self-explicating. In Luther’s words, it is“most certain, most easy to understand, most clear, its own interpreter,testing, judging and illuminating everything by everything.”63 In acertain sense Scripture does not need to be read at all in the Protestantimagination, insofar as its meaning is supposed to be perfectly clear,perfectly lucid, and perfectly available to anyone who would receive itwith an open heart, without any labor of interpretation, translation, ordecoding. “If we look at it with clear eyes,” Calvin writes in theInstitutes, “it will forthwith present itself with a divine majesty whichwill subdue our presumptuous opposition”; contemplating Scripture,we “feel perfectly assured—as much so as if we beheld the divineimage visibly impressed on it—that it came to us, by the instrumen-tality of men, from the very mouth of God.”64

But the sacred texts by no means guarantee that such assurance will beexperienced by the reader. “Faithful reading,” as one recent survey ofearly modern scriptural hermeneutics puts it, “can only happen in theeconomy of grace.”65 “The word is . . . like the sun which shines upon

sheets normally discarded as waste or to manufacture new sheets by pasting smaller pieces ofwriting paper together. See P.S. Dunkin, “Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes (1570) and single pageimposition,” The Library, 5th series, 2 (1947), 159–70.

62. Institutes, III.ii.6; unless otherwise noted, all Calvin quotations are taken from Institutes ofChristian Religion, tr. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, 1845–46).

63. In Mickey L. Mattox, “Martin Luther,” in Christian Theologies of Scripture, ed. Holcomb,p. 105.

64. Institutes, I.vii.4, I.vii.5.65. Harton, “Theologies of Scripture in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation,” in

Holcomb, ed., p. 88.



us all,” Calvin writes, “but is of no use to the blind”; “without theillumination of the Spirit the word has no effect.”66 Calvin makes itquite clear that faith is not grounded on Scripture, if by that we meanthat the reading of Scripture provides us with a kind of evidence for ourfaith. On the contrary, faith both precedes reading,“purifying the mindso as to give it a relish for divine truth,” and follows it as its consequence,as the knowledge and certainty of “the divine will in regard to us.”67

Much of the work of the second and third books of the Institutes consistsin elaborating this seemingly vicious circle, distinguishing a reading bothproduced by and producing faith from any other kind of reading. Calvinseparates a genuinely faithful reading even from a reading of the Biblethat assents to every word of the text; that is, he distinguishes betweena belief in the Bible that results from reading it, and is thus only the“shadow or image of faith,” from a reading that pledges itself to the bookin advance:“Multitudes undoubtedly believe . . . Scripture, in the sameway in which they believe in the records of past events, or events whichthey have actually witnessed.There are some who go even further: theyregard the word of God as an infallible oracle. . . . To such the testimonyof faith is attributed, but by catachresis.”68 Everything is geared towardestablishing the absolute difference of the Bible from anything we couldcall “evidence” or proof, even anything like a text, if by this we meansomething that requires interpretation.This is perhaps what is illustratedin the frontispiece of the Actes and Monumentes in that image of thetetragrammaton blazing forth in full glory: not an act of reading but areception of the divine spirit that conditions any true reading, and is thusthe truth of reading. It is Scripture as a sun shining only for those whocan see. Significantly, the antithesis of such reading is, for Calvin, thereading of a historical narrative: true reading is radically anti-historical,non-evidentiary, something totally unlike the examination of a witness.

66. Institutes, III.ii.34, III.ii.33. Catholic theologians would assent to this latter point, butwould argue that this “Spirit” was now institutionally present only in the Catholic church; seeJ. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), p. 23 andfns. 70, 71.

67. Institutes, III.ii.33, III.ii.6. As Randall Zachman writes, “when Calvin insists that Scrip-ture is self-authenticating (autopiston), . . . he does not mean that the Bible itself conveys its ownauthority to the pious, but that its divine origin has been disclosed to them by the inwardtestimony of the Holy Spirit,” in Holcomb, ed., p. 117

68. Institutes, III.ii.10, III.ii.9. John Allen renders the last phrase, “by a catachresis, a tropicalor improper form of expression,” Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. John Allen (Grand Rapids,1949), I, 607.



In this model of reading the book disappears.When we look at thebook, we see the “the divine image visibly impressed on it.” In HenryBeveridge’s translation this dream of a perfect seeing expresses itself byway of a metaphoric displacement of print: we see not the inked tracesof pieces of moveable type, but God himself “impressed” on the pages ofthe book.Thomas Norton’s sixteenth-century translation stays closer tothe Latin when it renders this phrase,“as if we beheld the maiesty of Godhimselfe there present,” but even here it is a matter of seeing not a bookbut the majesty of God, “Dei numen.”69 Metaphorically, the bookbecomes a kind of icon, a visual representation of precisely the kind thatCalvinist iconoclasm attacked so vigorously as an actual practice. Thetheologian who will a few pages later dismiss as a “catachresis” a faiththat follows the text rather than assenting to it absolutely and in advancenevertheless relies on a whole series of figurative displacements in orderto imagine what faithful reading is really like.At the same time, Calvin’sslight acknowledgment of “the instrumentality of men” intrudes thefaintest recognition of the inevitable mediation of the reading experi-ence, a recognition that the book that carries the word of God is a thingmade by human beings.The encounter with Scripture seeks to be theone perfectly unmediated experience of the divine in Calvinist thought,and as such places a tremendous, perhaps unsupportable epistemologicalburden on the act of reading, and above all on the physical incarnationof the text, its material being as an object that is vulnerable to textualcorruption, mistranslation, loss, and destruction.The physical book, theprinted word of God, marks the inevitable mediation of the divine wordand its embodiment as a humanly-constructed object. In this sense thebook is a screen between the faithful reader and the reception of God’sword; in response to that problem of mediation, Protestant scripturalhermeneutics leaps beyond the book to the inward prompting of thespirit and to the text as a sun or an image of God.

v

One problem with the standard narrative about the relationship betweenprint and Protestantism, then, is that Protestant scriptural hermeneutics

69. The Institvtion of Christian Religion, tr. Thomas Norton (1578), sig. C2v; Institvtio Chris-tianæ religionis (1576), sig. B3. Allen renders the key phrase, “an intuitive perception of Godhimself in it,” Institutes, tr. Allen, I, 90–91.



are themselves too paradoxical to support any easy celebration of thenew technology.Another is that it ignores the complexities of print as amedium of textual production. It depends on our capacity to imagineprint as establishing a certain epistemological fixity, a certain reliabilityand regularity of the text—a narrative that Adrian Johns has pointedlycritiqued. If, as Foxe writes, the “lyght of printyng” has given the wholeworld “eyes to see”—another figure strikingly distant from any realscene of reading—it also threatens to obtrude error, misreading, tenden-tious or even simply careless misappropriation, a fragmentation of thetext into the endlessly competing bibles of the early modern printmarket: the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, theRheims Bible, the “AuthorizedVersion,” and so on, with all the variousdefenses, glosses, corrections, and repudiations that the spread of God’sword in the vernacular actually entailed.70

This messy textual universe becomes still more complex once wefactor in the activities not only of translators and publishers but also ofreaders, as Peter Stallybrass has emphasized:“if we talk about the GenevaBible, the Bishops’ Bible, the Authorized Bible as separate translations,there are in fact elements that migrate from one translation to anotheror that are in some editions of a specific translation but not in another.Moreover, readers could add, and less often subtract, all kinds of materialsbeside what we might like to think of as “the bible proper” when theyhad their composite bibles bound and rebound. Bibles were, indeed,usually composites.”71 Early modern readers were not only interpretingtheir bibles idiosyncratically, they were also assembling idiosyncratic andvariable objects, so that what passed as “the Bible” could be quitedifferent from case to case. If the early modern period produced “TheWord of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in StephenGreenblatt’s felicitous phrase, it also produced a word of God dividedagainst itself, not “word” but “words,” endless, proliferating, polemicallycharged words.72

No wonder Foxe preferred to imagine the press as light or a voice,forgetting the messier realities of the print shop and, beyond it, the

70. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5.71. Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” p. 51.72. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 74.

See also Kastan,“ ‘The noyse of the new Bible,’ ” and Jane O. Newman,“The Word Made Print:Luther’s 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Representations 11 (1985),95–134.



marketplace for books, in which readers could make and remake thetext according to their own interests and desires, their own “secreteiudgements.” The Actes and Monumentes, of course, is an historicalnarrative, and thus exactly the kind of work that Calvin used toexemplify the dynamics of non-scriptural reading. And yet its herme-neutics at times parallels the central paradox of Protestant scripturalism,which at once places the book at the center of a psychological dramaof faith and also simultaneously withdraws it, retracts it, and makes itaccessible only to a faith given in advance. In a similar way the Actesand Monumentes offers countless scenes of witnessing, a massive accu-mulation of historical and textual evidence, and yet also tells us that wewill be convinced by this evidence only if we have already committedourselves to it, only if we have “true disposed mindes.” It tells us thatwe can only read the documents that record these scenes of witnessingif we already know what they have to say. The Actes and Monumentesembeds a hermeneutic that enables it to insist on the central impor-tance of the manuscript document, and even on the document’sfragile, physical form, its vulnerability to corruption, while also imag-ining that we can look through this fragile physicality, that we canreverse or undo the damage of time, that we can evade the problemsof transmission and come into direct contact with a divine truth onlypartly testified to in the document as we have it.

Beyond Calvin’s juxtaposition of historical and scriptural reading theActes and Monumentes discovers a dynamic of faith that underwrites theinterpretation of historical and textual evidence, securing the true placeof the archive: not, finally, the brittle or damaged manuscript page, noryet the printed page that seeks to salvage the document, but the mind ofthe reader. The Actes and Monumentes thus manifests a complicatedrelationship to the medium of its own realization. It motivates a set oftypographical codes that seek to make the printed page transparent tothe documents it encodes; an archival rhetoric that equivocates aboutthe kinds of translation through which those documents have becomeprint; and a hermeneutics of reading that finally bypasses the question ofdocumentary evidence altogether in order to assert that the properinterpretation of all of these “monuments” depends on a faith that bothunderwrites the true knowledge of history and enables the often radicalrewriting of the documents themselves. In all of this, the book manifestsa relationship to its medium that reflects both the particular difficultiesof this archival project and a typically Protestant hermeneutics of



reading, in which the material book and above all the printed bookoccupies a paradoxical, perhaps contradictory position within theeconomy of faith.

stony brook university

