Christopher Frank Highley and John N. King, eds. John Foxe and his World.

(St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.) Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. xx + 298 pp. + 1 col. and 40 b/w pls. index. $99.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0306-7.

Recent years have witnessed a transformation in historical and literary understandings of John Foxe and the great Book of Martyrs that bears his name, as it has moved from an always-recognized (if misunderstood) text into an essential work that casts light on early modern religion, nationhood, martyrdom, persecution, print and editorial practices, and questions of texts, literacy, and authorship. The British Academy Foxe Project, overseen by David Loades, as well as the work of Tom Freeman, Susan Wabuda, John King, and others, have contributed to this important development in early modern Reformation history; with the collection of essays that constitutes John Foxe and his World--as well as those contained in the Loades-edited John Foxe: An Historical Perspective and John Foxe and the English Reformation--the field promises to yield fertile harvests for years to come.

The most important fact to consider about Foxe's Acts and Monuments is that it is not really Foxe's book at all. As Patrick Collinson points out in "John Foxe and National Consciousness," while "[t]here are few instances in English literary history of a more complete fusion of author and text," in reality the book represents "a rather extreme example of an authorial, and authoritative stamp being placed on what was actually a highly collaborative literary venture" (16-17). With publisher John Day taking on an active role in the typological and paratextual presentation and printing production of the book, and collaborators such as Miles Coverdale and Henry Bull carefully editing (and at times shading) the materials and documents that originated, for example, with the martyrs under Mary, "Foxe's [own] part in the enterprise," writes Collinson, "is almost reduced to that of an editor (albeit a highly proactive editor) who went to great pains to obtain and verify his materials" (13). What results is an unstable text carrying multiple authorship; equally pertinent are the multivocal readings and textual audiences that derive from the book, with Foxe (or "Foxe") himself simultaneously addressing both the godly community and the country, the remnant and the multitude, even as the book resists, for Collinson, becoming a reflection of the kind of "elect nation" idea so lauded by traditional historians of the past.

Along with an introduction by John King, Collinson's essay opens the collection, which derives from a 1999 conference given at Ohio State University and organized by King, Christopher Highley, and Geoffrey Parker. What follows are fifteen essays--and an afterward by David Loades--divided under various subject headings that seek to understand an aspect of Foxe under the aegis of "Historiography," "History of the Book," "Visual Culture," "Roman Catholicism," and "Women and Gender." Among the more notable essays is "'The book, the leafe, yea and the very sentence': Sixteenth-Century Literacy in Text and Context," in which Cynthia Wittman Zollinger utilizes various narrative examples to illustrate the means by which the Acts and Monuments "offers an extensive ethnography of Protestant reading and writing practices, a social document which maps the cultural role of literacy and its iconic identification with the Protestant faith" (103). By examining the testimony of individuals interrogated under Mary especially, one may glean the presence and nature of textual communities, and of a larger culture "situated between orality and literacy" (115). In the same mode, David Kastan, in "Little Foxes," examines the physical as well as the literary monumentality of the book and its subsequent reductions into abridgement form, from which it subsequently reached the broader audiences of later generations. As Kastan demonstrates, the Acts and Monuments as it came to exist in the "English imagination" is not one book; "rather, it is several different books, each reflecting the particular interests of its editors, redactors, abridgers, and publishers every bit as much as they reflect Foxe's own concerns" (129).

The woodcuts and illustrations contained in the Book of Martyrs (and on excellent display in John Foxe and his World) merit particular scrutiny in the collection, which also includes an analysis by Christopher Highley of the very different visual representations conveyed in Richard Verstegan's Catholic martyrology entitled Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum. In "Illustrating the Book: A Protestant Dilemma," Andrew Pettegree describes the Acts and Monuments--or the four editions that were published in Foxe's lifetime--as appearing at a "highly fortuitous moment: when the English printing industry had attained the maturity to take on such a project, but before the iconophobia of continental Calvinism had yet made its influence felt" (135). For Thomas Betteridge, on the other hand, no conflict exists between the allegedly idolatrous images and the words of the text; in his fascinating essay, "Truth and History in the Acts and Monuments," Betteridge describes words and images as serving mutually supportive, didactic, and above all dialectical functions, as they resolve the tensions contained in the book, between its apparently contradictory presentation of atemporal truth and particular, corruptible history, between the invisible and the visible, the eternal and the corporeal, the universal and the contingent, the "ahistorical act of martyrdom" and the "historical record of persecution" (148).

Unlike many conference-originating essay collections, John Foxe and his World is consistently strong and insightful throughout, as its authors utilize emerging understandings of Foxe to explore new paths of research, or to reconsider traditional interpretations of well-known subjects; in the latter case, Sarah Bali's "Editing Anne Askew's Examinations: John Bale, John Foxe, and Early Modern Textual Practices" is especially interesting as it demonstrates that the narrative voice of Anne Askew was as much shaped (or even "constructed") by the very particular (if more subtle) editing hand of John Foxe as it was by that of John Bale. As a result, the Askew we know is the Askew of Foxe (or "Foxe"), as she joins her editorially-shaped, abridged, or redacted peers for the consumption of future godly readers; such was the influence of these portraits on the English mind that, as one character from Jasper Mayne's The City Match (1639) says to another in describing her righteous servant (in a quote taken from Kastan's essay): "she will make/The Acts and Monuments in sweet-meats ... / all my banquets / Are persequutions ... / and we eat Martyrs" (128).

SARAH COVINGTON

Queens College, City University of New York