Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition

DOI

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

John Foxe (1517-87) was one of the most influential writers of the English Reformation. In the forty years between 1547 and his death, he produced some forty works in English and Latin. However, both in his lifetime and since then, he has been principally known for only one of them, The Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs. John Foxe fled to the Continent during the reign of Mary I, and on his return, wrote a history of the English Protestant martyrs from the 14th century to his own time. Usually known as The Book of Martyrs, it traces the triumph of Protestantism through the sufferings of English Protestants. Some four hundred copies of Foxes editions of 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583 remain, but most are defective to some extent, and all bear their original imperfections. Although microfilms of all the four original editions were available, and were adequate for general use, they too had their imperfections. The copies selected for filming were damaged and incomplete and many running heads and marginalia were omitted during photography. Moreover, these images were devoid of any commentary or apparatus, and well over a hundred years of Reformation scholarship had elapsed since Pratt completed his work. Also a number of bowdlerised and abbreviated editions had been published in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, and although there was little danger of these deceiving serious scholars, the proposal suggested that the time was ripe for the full text to reappear with a modern commentary. It had also been recognised for some time that the Acts and Monuments is a major work of sixteenth century scholarship and a significant influence upon the development of the national identity. A reliable scholarly edition was urgently required. In 1993 the British Academy established this project to produce a new edition. Originally, a paper copy was envisaged, however the scale of the project soon became too large to make this feasible. The 1583 edition alone is densely packed with information, including reference to hundreds of sources, some of them imperfectly identified. In scale it runs to nearly three million words. The Committee decided to switch its objective from a print edition to CD-ROM, which in turn would make a variorum edition feasible, embracing all the four original texts. Due to technical developments and innovations in 2002, the committee, with the approval of the British Academy, decided to transfer the publishing medium from CD-ROM to an online edition.

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This British Academy ‘Category One Research Project’ has produced a new, definitive edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs, based on a textual reconstruction of the four editions published in Foxe’s lifetime. It also contains extensive editorial commentaries, information on people and places mentioned in the text, and bibliographical database and a corpus of scholarly essays. Data Contents This resource consists of four kinds of data, namely: 1) 158 .html files which constitute a selection of all the original website constituents. 2) 12,058 .xml files containing information about different textual materials such as transcriptions, editorial comments, and summaries found in books 1 to 12 of all four editions (i.e. 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583) of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs 3) 2,472 image *.png files featuring original index tables, pages and woodcuts shown primarily in John Foxe’s 1583 edition of the book 4) Eight tabular files containing data on bibliographic scholarly works, publications and other materials related to the Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

No sampling (total universe)

Transcription of existing materials

Compilation or synthesis of existing material

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5047-1
Metadata Access https://datacatalogue.cessda.eu/oai-pmh/v0/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_ddi25&identifier=5bcac1981f431ccaac1f82c647e36d94fc23df6be0907b14965c525744fa8787
Provenance
Creator Greengrass, M., University of Sheffield, Humanities Research Institute
Publisher UK Data Service
Publication Year 2006
Funding Reference Arts and Humanities Research Board; British Academy; University of Sheffield; Aurelius Trust
Rights Copyright British Academy; <p>The Data Collection is available to UK Data Service registered users subject to the <a href="https://ukdataservice.ac.uk/app/uploads/cd137-enduserlicence.pdf" target="_blank">End User Licence Agreement</a>.</p><p>Commercial use of the data requires approval from the data owner or their nominee. The UK Data Service will contact you.</p>
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Text; Numeric; Still image
Discipline History; Humanities
Spatial Coverage England