This DVD-ROM contains
The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, also
known as "The Book of Martyrs", by John Foxe. This
collection is included on this DVD-ROM in 4 different
formats:
(1)
Original 8 volume books, scanned into PDF format.
(2)
Digitized PDF files of the original set, meaning they
are typed and modernized in digital format, for easy
searching and low file size.
(3) .EPUB
format for your tablet, digital reader, phone
(4) The
full unabridged Audiobook in mp3 format, a full 20 hours
in length!
Please note, this disk
will not play in your car CD player or home DVD player,
this is disk is for your computer only.
The Times
There was never a
worse place or time to be religious than
Europe in the 16th Century. These were cruel
times. There was the death penalty for all but the
most petty offences, and
hangings were a popular spectator sport. Indeed, hanging
was a lenient punishment: flaying, impaling, breaking on
the wheel, and being hung upside down and sawn through
from groin to scalp were alternatives. Lesser crimes
such as begging were punished with flogging, branding or
mutilation. Torture was widespread and trials, if held
at all, often a travesty of justice. Warfare, too, was
conducted with the utmost brutality; massacre, rape and
pillage of the civilian population were standard
practice, and the slaughter of enemy prisoners was
common, sometimes even including those who had been
promised their lives if they surrendered.
Religious hatred made
things even worse. Reading Foxe, or other authors of the
time, whether Protestant or Catholic, it is striking how
absolutely certain everyone was that not only were they
right, but that their opponents were the agents of
Satan. Foxe knew that the Pope was the Antichrist
predicted by the Bible in the same way as he knew that
water was wet or that the sun went round the earth. From
this certainty sprang the intolerance from which
persecution arises. It was argued, that if a murderer,
who only slew the body, deserved death; how much more
deserving of death was a heretic, whose evil falsehoods
could destroy the victim's soul. This being so, it was
clear that any means could and should be used to stamp
out these devil's spawn. Both sides believed that there
was only one true religion and all deviation from it was
hellish; they only differed about which religion it was.
Catholics persecuted Protestants and vice versa; each
side persecuted its own heretics with equal vigour. In
Eastern Europe, the Orthodox faith was both
perpetrator and victim. In
England, the official
religion changed four times in less than thirty years,
and each change was accompanied by persecution of those
who would not change with it. The division of Europe
into Catholic and Protestant powers, often at war with
one another, meant that in some countries (especially
England) preaching the
wrong religion was regarded as supporting the enemy and
punished as treason.
The Book
John Foxe or Fox
(1518-1587), a staunchly Protestant divine, wrote his
book as this story seen from the Protestant point of
view. The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church,
better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was first
published in English in 1563. In this enormously long
history of the Church from the death of Christ to the
accession of Queen Elizabeth I, he is anxious to prove
firstly the complete hatefulness, evil and corruption of
the Catholic church, the papacy and the monastic orders,
and secondly to assert the right of the monarch to
appoint bishops and clergy, and to dispose of church
property and income at will. Everything (and that means
everything) which supports this view goes in;
everything which does not is either left out, glossed
over, or rejected as ipso facto untrue because
asserted by his opponents. For example, his treatment of
Savonarola is breathtaking in its omissions. To read
Foxe's account, one would think that Savonarola was a
humble monk, plucked from his cell and burned for
preaching a few sermons -- there is not a word about his
capture of the government of Florence, theocratic rule
(with bonfires of vanities,) nor of his inciting a
French army to invade Italy and occupy Florence; still
less of his claims to possess miraculous powers. If his
sources support his prejudices, however, his credulity
knows no bounds; he is as ready to peddle the myth of
Jewish blood-sacrifices of Christian children as he is
to believe in the foundation of the church in England by
Joseph of Arimathea. When he gets closer to his own
times, however, his accounts are in most cases taken
from eye-witness evidence or official documents and must
be accepted as basically factual. There is no doubt that
Protestants were savagely persecuted by Henry VIII and
especially by Mary I and that this contributed to the
fear and hatred which animates the book. The gruesome
and enormously detailed accounts of the martyrdoms of
Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and all the other victims of
Bloody Mary's tyranny are sober fact. Nonetheless, any
students tempted to regard the book as a work of history
are warned to check anything Foxe says with some more
even-handed historian before reproducing it.
Influence
Foxe's Book of
Martyrs was very widely read and had a deep influence on
English thinking for centuries. In the Seventeenth
century, it contributed to what historians have called
the "Catholic myth"; that is the belief that English
Catholics, in reality a powerless and beleaguered
minority, were a vast conspiracy ready to seize any
opportunity to overthrow the state, enslave the people,
introduce the Inquisition etc. It is arguable that this
belief was one of the principal causes of the English
Civil War, and quite certain that it was a cause of the
rebellion of Monmouth and the "Popish Plot" conspiracy,
not to mention the expulsion of James II in the
"Glorious Revolution". A century later, the Gordon riots
of 1780 drew most of their strength from it; in the
words of Dickens in Barnaby Rudge:
. . .
the air was filled with whispers of a confederacy among
the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England,
establish an inquisition in London, and turn the pens of
Smithfield market into stakes and cauldrons; when
terrors and alarms which no man understood were
perpetually broached, both in and out of Parliament, by
one enthusiast who did not understand himself, and
bygone bugbears which had lain quietly in their graves
for centuries, were raised again to haunt the ignorant
and credulous.
Well into the Nineteenth
century these ideas were widespread. In vulgar form they
were held among the less educated. George Eliot refers
to this often, though of course she was too sensible to
share them. Among the more educated and civilised, they
were believed in a more educated and civilised way.
William Cobbett, in his equally but oppositely biased
History of the Protestant Reformation (pub. 1826)
devotes some space to refuting Foxe.
And today? Ian Paisley
and his followers certainly sleep with it under the
pillow, as do some Scottish Presbyterians and US Deep
South fundamentalists, and the religion described in
Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series bears a
close resemblance to the Catholic church as imagined by
Foxe. (Most modern opponents of the Catholic
church, however, have
entirely different reasons for their views.)
YOU GET
ALL 4 FORMATS OF THIS CLASSIC WORK ON THIS DVD AS NOTED
ABOVE!
