Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition

UKDA study number:5047

Principal Investigator

Greengrass, M.
University of Sheffield. Humanities Research Institute

Sponsors

British Academy
Arts and Humanities Research Board
University of Sheffield
Aurelius Trust

Distributed by

UK Data Archive, University of Essex, Colchester.

December 2006

Bibliographic Citation

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Greengrass, M., Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], December 2006. SN: 5047, http://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-5047-1

Acknowledgement

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Copyright:
British Academy

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5047 . Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition

Depositor:

Greengrass, M. , University of Sheffield. Humanities Research Institute

Principal Investigator:

Greengrass, M. , University of Sheffield. Humanities Research Institute

Sponsors:

British Academy
Arts and Humanities Research Board
University of Sheffield
Aurelius Trust

Other Acknowledgements:

Dr Margaret Aston (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Dr Tom Betteridge - Kingston-upon-Thames Univerisity (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Professor Patrick Collinson - Trinity College, Cambridge (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Dr Elizabeth Evenden - York (extensive preparation of the individual biographical entries for Book 11 and 12, and contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Dr Andrew Foster - University College, Chichester (assistance with identifying individuals mentioned in Foxe's text relating to Chichester)

Mr Daveth Frost - St David's Catholic College, Cardiff (assistance with Foxe's patristic citations, derived from his thesis, in preparation, on 'Sacrament an Alter, a Tudor Catholic eucharistic catena, drawn from Foxe's 1576 account of the Oxford Disputations, translated into Cornish and appended to the Cornish translation of Bishop Bonner's Homilies, BL Add. MS 46397')

Professor Devorah Greenberg - Simon Fraser University, Canada (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Professor John King - Ohio State University, USA (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Professor Thomas Mayer - Augustana University, Rock Island, Illinois (assistance with materials relating to Cardinal Pole)

Dr Peter Nockles - Manchester University (contributor to the interpretative essays accompanying the edition)

Mr Brett Usher - London (material on Foxe's martyrs in the London diocese)

Professor Susan Wabuda, Professor of History at Fordham University (prepared the material in the text commentary relating to Hugh Latimer)

Mr John Wade - University of Sheffield (preparation of the Latin and Greek translations; identification of Foxe's patristic sources - derived from his thesis, in preparation, on 'John Foxe as a Latinist; a study of Foxe's Latin writings, with particular reference to the period from 1547 to 1558')

Abstract:

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.

Main Topics:

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.

Coverage:

Time Period Covered: 1563 - 1583
Dates of Fieldwork: 1996 - 2004
Country: England
Spatial Units: no information recorded
Observation Units: Text units (documents/chapters/words)
Kind of Data: Textual data; Numeric data; Alpha/numeric data; Image

Universe Sampled:

Location of Units of Observation: Subnational
Population: Textual and image material from the four English editions, years 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583 of Foxe's martyrology published in London

Methodology:

Time Dimensions: Cross-sectional (one-time) study
Sampling Procedures: No sampling (total universe)
Method of Data Collection: Transcription of existing materials; Compilation or synthesis of existing material
Data Sources:
This Variorum Edition concentrates on the four English editions of Foxe's martyrology published in London during his own lifetime: those of 1563; 1570; 1576 and 1583. The copies used were located in:

Magdalen College Library
[1563] - Arch B.i.4.13 [Magd - 1563]
[1570] - T.13.6; T.13.7 (bound in 2 vos) [Magd - 1570]

The Bodleian Library, Oxford
[1563] - Douce F.subt.2 [Bod - 1563]
[1570] - Mason F. 142; Mason F. 143; Mason F.144 (bound in 3 vols) Bod - 1570]
[1576] - Mason F. 148 [Bod - 1576]
[1583] - F.3.1 and F.3.2 (bound in 2 vols) [Bod - 1583]

Microfilm
[1563] - STC 11223 [C U]
[1570] - STC 11223 [Harv U]
[1576] - STC 11224 [Huntington]
[1583] - STC 11225


Weighting: no weighting conducted

Language(s) of Written Materials:

Study Description: English
Study Documentation: English

Access:

Access Conditions: The depositor has specified that registration is required and standard conditions of use apply. The depositor may be informed about usage. See terms and conditions for further information.
Availability: History Data Service, UK Data Archive
External note: This data are also available from this resource's original website: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/index.html (last viewed 11/12/2006)
Contact: Help desk: hds@essex.ac.uk

Date of First Release:

18 December 2006

Copyright:

British Academy

File last updated:

4 January 2012