John Foxe

Fox's Book of Martyrs (Annotated) John Foxe

Differentiated book- It has a historical context with research of the time-John Foxe repudiated the title 'martyrologist', the label most often attributed to his name, almost to the extent that it does not belong to any other English writer and reader of history. Foxe wanted to be known as a 'storyteller', that is, a historian. (How we distinguish between storytellers and historians, and even if we must make such a distinction, are questions to which we will have to return.) What was "history" for those who inhabited the sixteenth century? Until very recently, the standard accounts of 16th-century historiography were what historians, following Sir Herbert Butterfield, have learned to call "Whiggish," that is, largely progressive. History writers were awarded brownie points based on their ability to write what, for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (but no, perhaps for the postmodernist twenty-first century), was "adequate" history. [In the late 16th century, writers of "political" or "civil" history, as in England, William Camden, were already arriving there. They had begun to resemble us, in their dispassionate approach to the subject and their respect for The Archive Record. But as Quentin Skinner and others have taught us, that is not the way to write intellectual history. It is not our business to lift our ears for the first cuckoo in the spring, or look for the first drink that almost a summer ago.