Foxe’s Christian Martyrs by John Foxe
FOXE’S CHRISTIAN MARTYRS
John Foxe was born in 1516 in Boston, Lincolnshire, England. At the age of sixteen, he went to Oxford, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1537, became a professor, and completed his master’s in 1543. While teaching at Oxford, he became friends with Hugh Latimer and William Tyndale, embracing Protestantism.
After leaving the university and marrying in 1545, Foxe was ordained a deacon of the Church of England and worked for the Reformation, writing tracts and beginning work on his account of Christian martyrs. But he was forced to leave the country in 1553 when the Catholic queen Mary took the throne.
The first portion of Foxe’s “book of martyrs” was published in France in 1554. Foxe then moved to Basel, Switzerland, where he worked as a printer’s proofreader and received manuscripts and eyewitness accounts of Queen Mary’s persecution of Protestants in England. After Elizabeth I became queen, Foxe returned to England and published his entire book under the title Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days in 1563.
Becoming popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, the text was widely read by English Puritans, shaping public opinion about Catholicism for at least a century.
Ordained an Anglican priest in 1560, Foxe refused all church offices due to his Puritan beliefs. He continued to preach and minister, though, serving victims of the plague of 1563 and urging Queen Elizabeth against the execution of Anabaptists in 1575 and Jesuits in 1581.
John Foxe died in 1587.