|
The Foxe Project based at the University of Sheffield,
has now moved into its final phase.
The Foxe Project is now directed by Professor Mark Greengrass, who is also Director
of the Humanities Research Institute where the Foxe Project is based. Professor David Loades is now Literary Director.
The
Committee also includes:
Professor James Carley, Distinguished Professor at Toronto
Professor Alexandra
Walsham, University of Exeter, who Chairs the Committee
Professor Alec Ryrie, Department of Theology, University of
Durham.
When the Foxe Project was launched David Loades explained his hopes :-
My principal academic project
for the last decade has been the production of a new edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments - commonly known as
Foxe's Book of Martyrs. The intention is to publish a variorum edition online incoporating the four original
texts for which Foxe was personally responsible - that is 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583. The user will be able to trace the development
of the text from one edition to the next, and to search each for textual variations, sources and personal and topographical
identifications. Each text has been transcribed into a modern typeface, and throughly tagged, but otherwise retains the spelling
and formatting of the original. Latin and Old English documents and Greek quotations are newly translated. John Foxe was the
compiler rather than the author of this work, and he made use of many assistants, who are also identified as far as possible.
His original Latin versions of 1554 and 1559 are extensively used in the commentary, but are not included in the edition.
Similarly, the reception of the work after Foxe's lifetime is also discussed, but none of the material added later is incorporated.
Some commentary, particularly of a theological nature, is taken over from the edition of S. R. Cattley and George Town (1837-41),
but the historical and textual commentary is completely new. It was the inadequacies of the Cattley/Townsend edition (based
on a single text) which prompted the need for this new version in the first place.
The original proposal for the John
Foxe Project was made to the British Academy in 1992. It was adopted, and the work commenced in 1993. I became Director with
Dr. David Newcombe as Research Assistant and an Academy Committee chaired by Professor Patrick Collinson. When I retired from
the University of Wales, Bangor in 1996, the Project was relocated to the Humanities Research Institute at the University
of Sheffield where it remains. In 1999 the funding support was transferred to the Arts and Humanities Research Board and at
the end of David Newcombe's tenure he was replaced by Dr. Tom Freeman. Two full-time transcibers are employed at Sheffield
assisted by a team of voluntary and part-time workers. In 2001 Professor Patrick Collinson ended his term of office as Chairman
of the Management Committee and his place was taken by Professor Mark Greengrass.
In 2001 a CD ROM Facsimile
of the 1583 edition, with a limited commentary, was published by the Oxford University Press. (Reviewed by Dr. Eamon Duffy
in The John Foxe Bulletin) It was based on a copy, generously loaned by Professor Collinson. The Project aims to
produce the variorum edition of Book 10-12 (covering the year 1554-59) by March 2004 when the present funding ends. It is
hoped that Books 1-9 will be part of a new phase with the intention of completing the whole work by 2008. A printed version,
based upon the 1570 text will be published by the University of Ohio Press after the electronic edition is complete, and will
be a separately funded in the USA.
In November 2003 David Loades chaired sessions at the Sixteenth Century Studies
Conference at Pittsburgh.
Since 1995 four specialist international conferences have been held in connection with the
Project and the proceedings have been published by Ashgate as John Foxe and the English Reformation (1997), John
Foxe: an historical perspective (1999), both edited by myself; and John Foxe and his World (2001) edited by
John King and Christopher Highley. The fourth volume, John Foxe at Home and Abroad, edited by myself,has been published
in July 2004.
A fifth conference on John Foxe and the Catholic Tradition, was held at Magdalene College, Cambridge,
UK July 3-5 July 2004 and sponsored by CRASSH
http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe
==================================================
A REVIEW OF DAVID LOADES' JOHN FOXE AT HOME AND ABROAD
David Loades, ed., John Foxe at Home and Abroad. Ashgate, Aldershot. 2004. xx + 297 pp. ISBN: 0754632393.
Reviewer: Ian Archer, Keble College, Oxford
One of the pleasing by-products of the John Foxe Project, established
by the British Academy in 1993 under the directorship of David Loades, and now based at the University of Sheffield has been
a series of biennial conferences, which have brought forth a wealth of Foxe scholarship. This volume prints papers from the
fourth colloquium, which were intended as a tribute to Patrick Collinson, who had served as Chairman of the Project Management
Committee since 1994.
The theme, John Foxe at Home and Abroad reminds us that the English Reformation was
both home-grown and part of a wider continental movement. Several papers seek to shed light on the early stages of evangelical
protestantism which were part of Foxe's intellectual formation. Magnus Williamson traces some fascinating connections between
evangelicals at Boston (Foxe's birthplace) in the 1520s and the radical cell uncovered at Wolsey's new foundation, Cardinal
College in 1528. Among them was the church musician John Taverner, a lay clerk at Tattershall, who from 1526 assembled an
impressive choir for the new college, recruiting several members from Boston, to which he returned on Wolsey's fall, probably
having now abandoned the composition of 'popish ditties'. In a final coda Williamson speculates that the radical impetus at
Boston may have been supplied by William Tyndale for a person of that name was employed as a chaplain of the Lady Guild at
Boston in 1521-2. The advanced evangelical leanings of Boston are elaborated upon in Claire Cross' essay on the ministry of
the forward protestant Melchior Smith at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. Brett Usher, whose work is always a pleasure
to read, applies his serendipitous arts to early protestantism in Essex, showing how bequests of books in clerical wills can
radically alter our understanding of the leanings of particular individuals and reveal godly networks such as that he sees
here being fostered by 'Father' Richard Alvey under the patronage of Lord Rich. Another paper by David Marcombe on the fate
of almshouse complex at Spital-in-the-Street became entangled in the later years of Elizabeth's reign in the struggle between
conformist clergy and radical gentlemen determined on resolving the unfinished business of the reformation through the redirection
of the hospital's assets. These four essays all demonstrate the potential that still remains for detailed local studies, particularly
ones informed by knowledge of connections between individuals, to inform our understanding of the dynamics of reform.
Several
contributors remind us of the connections between the English reformation and the continent. At the most basic material level
Elizabeth Evenden, whose knowledge of the environment of Tudor print culture is all-passing, demonstrates that John Day's
edition of Foxe would have been impossible without the help he had obtained from a number of specialist Dutch printers. Guido
Latré provides some interesting evidence of Foxe's first-hand acquaintance with van Haemstede's Dutch martyrology, which reinforces
Andrew Pettegree's suggestion at a previous colloquium that Foxe may have got his core thesis of understanding contemporary
matryrs as part of the history of true church through all ages from the Dutchman. Exile experiences also shaped the development
of protestantism. John Wade provides us with an excellent edition (Latin text and translation) of a little known Foxe publication,
the Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio, printed in Basel within ten weeks of Elizabeth's accession, and presented to
Elizabeth, the fourth of duke of Norfolk and Heinrich Bullinger. Wade demonstrates how the text captures the hopes and some
of the fears for the godly cause on Elizabeth's accession, stressing the need for the providentially delivered queen to be
guided by wise counsel in the paths of reformation for which Germany might provide an example.
An exile experience
of a rather different kind is the subject of Anne Overell's highly suggestive essay on Edward Courtenay, whose apparently
erratic behaviour she interprets as a result of his nicodemism. As nicodemism was all about covering one's tracks such cases
are difficult to prove: was the Beneficio, a work produced in a catholic reformist milieu but admittedly under suspicion for
its orthodoxy, really given to Courtenay for translation by Italian protestant emigres, or was it a sign of the fuzziness
of confessional labels in the later 1540s? But Overell certainly shows us that Courtenay was keeping some pretty dodgy company
in his Italian exile, and that he may have been bumped off by government agents. It's a fascinating story.
The Foxe
Project, of course, is a major contribution to the history of the book. It was at the fourth colloquium that the Variorum
edition now available on-line was first unveiled, and it is here the subject of an essay by Mark Greeengrass, Joy Lloyd, and
Sue Smith. The excitement of this publishing event is perhaps understated here, for we now have an edition worthy of the complexities
of Foxe's evolving text, allowing comparison between successive editions, and through its critical apparatus shedding light
on Foxe's sources and methods of composition. In a perhaps unnecessarily theoretically overwrought contribution Devorah Greenberg
shows how evolving Foxe scholarship over the past decade has taken on board the notions of Foxe's work as a collective endeavour,
and one subject to varying appropriations by subsequent generations. Greenberg tells us that she has identified ten variously
interwoven communities that assisted in the 'authoring' of 'Foxe': it is unfortunately difficult to abstract them from her
exposition. The process of textual appropriation is explored by Paul Arblaster who shows how it was only in the seventeenth
century that Foxe passed into the Dutch consciousness, with chunks of Foxe (translated into Dutch by a soldier named Henry
Hexham) added to the reissues of van Haemstede's martyrology. Francis Bremer shows how Foxe was subjected to contested interpretations
by New England protestants, being used both to buttress the establishment, and to argue for the dangers of persecution. Margaret
Deane argues that Harriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is to be understood as influenced by distinctly protestant notions
of martyrdom. Finally the babble of the internet ensures that the processes of appropriation are ever fertile. Janice Devereux
gives us a tour of some Foxe websites, including some of the whackier ones. However, before visiting them, I would strongly
counsel going to http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe - a brave new world of learning will be revealed.
==================================================
A
Review of:
King, John N., Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2006.
This study considers John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a vast collection of documents that centres
on the experience of hundreds of people who were burnt alive for their religious beliefs in sixteenth-century England. It
won renown as the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of the early modern era. John
King addresses the question of how this aggregation of documents came to exert a considerable influence upon the consciousness
of early modern England, one that was perhaps greater than all other books aside from the English Bible and Book of Common
Prayer. His research indicates that Foxe's untiring energy as a collector of documents and his command of sophisticated editorial
procedures, in combination with his publisher's ingenious mastery of book production and sales, enabled the Book of Martyrs
to harness a full range of printing practices and to encourage reading habits designed to promote change in religion, national
identity, and intellectual and social life. The Book of Martyrs is unique in its exemplification of a complete constellation
of features associated with early modern English print culture.
Professor King has undertaken to write the history
of a book that epitomizes the history of the book in early modern England. Not only does this study situate the Book of
Martyrs within the context of printing and publication in London, it also considers continental antecedents that go back
to the advent of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century and to the manuscript culture that preceded and coexisted
with it. Foxe oversaw expansion of his martyrological history from about 55,000 words in its initial Latin installment to
a text that ballooned from nearly 2,000,000 to almost 4,000,000 words in four vernacular editions overseen by Foxe and his
publisher, John Day. At about four times the length of the Bible, the monumental fourth edition is the most physically imposing
English book of its era. Ordinary people read chained copies of the Book of Martyrs and the Bible in many parish churches.
Each edition reflects its historical moment both as an ideological construction and as an artifact of the hand-operated press.
Containing an extraordinary array of genres (e.g., martyrologies, poems, speeches, tracts, biographies, historical documents,
spiritual memoirs, letters, and more), these editions manifest a full range of printing practices including interplay of different
typefaces and founts, marginalia, woodcuts, cross references, and indices.
This study begins by comparing notable
English and continental books with the Book of Martyrs in order to demonstrate how it exemplifies the impact of printing
as a cultural medium. It responds to mistaken claims that John Foxe was an author in the modern sense of this term by demonstrating
how he worked largely as a compiler who gathered material from a wide array of printed and manuscript sources. It goes on
to consider the publication of the Book of Martyrs within John Day's career as one of England's most successful printer-publishers.
In addition to considering how Day exemplified the office of the master printer, King compares his achievement to that of
notable continental printer-publishers such as Anton Koberger, Christopher Plantin, and Johannes Oporinus. Placing great emphasis
upon Day's marketing of this book for a socially and intellectually stratified readership, King investigates the epistemological
and cultural importance of layout and paratext for the reception of this book by early readers. He accordingly demonstrates
how Day joined Foxe in hybridizing different conventions employed in the printing of books for learned and unlearned readers.
This study then opens out to an examination of the iconography of scores of woodcuts that made the Book of Martyrs
the most heavily illustrated English book of its time. The argument corrects the prevailing view that Foxe controlled the
woodcuts by showing how John Day, printer of the finest illustrated books produced during the first century of English printing,
imposed distinctive elements of house style on woodcuts that he commissioned and owned. He collaborated with Foxe in observing
coherent patterns of illustration in the course of their iconoclastic reshaping of traditional images of the saints. Among
other important issues, King explores how early modern readers responded to the woodcuts. Finally, this book considers the
importance of the Book of Martyrs within the social history of reading. Going beyond investigation of multiple prefaces
that Foxe wrote and revised for the different editions of this book, King explores Foxe's inclusion of stories that offer
edifying lessons concerning literacy. In addition to considering the provenance of extant copies and library inventories in
order to address patterns of book acquisition and reading, he discusses of how early modern readers understood and applied
their reading. In doing so, this study places considerable emphasis on previously unrecorded inscriptions entered by hand
in many copies of the Book of Martyrs. Evidence of this kind enables us to distinguish between popular and elite
readership and to contrast the sociable reception of individuals who read copies chained in public (e.g., guildhalls
and churches) with the more solitary habits of Latin-literate scholars, clerics, and well-to-do individuals who read the costly
folio volumes in libraries, cathedrals, or private homes.
John King is Distinguished University Professor and
Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
===============================================
|
