John Foxe: Historiographer, Disciplinarian, Tolerationist

The occasion of this article is the appearance of V. Norskov Olsen's John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley, San Francisco and London: University of California Press, 1973, xi + 264 pages, $11.50). Gleanings from numerous other volumes dealing with Foxe, and from editions of his works, will also be reflected in this treatment. Professor Olsen has closely studied Foxe both as an author and as a churchman moving in the ecclesiastical environment of the Tudor era. His book, however, offers neither a biography of Foxe nor an account of the Elizabethan church. Instead it sheds light on numerous incidents in which Foxe played some part in the history of the church, and clarifies his relation to Puritanism and the establishment. The most distinct impression left in the reader's mind is that of the personality of Foxe as Olsen sees him, namely, a man of widely varied interests and talents but of unified purpose, an irenic spirit amid contending forces, playing a minor role in public while laboriously engaged in the research and writing that brought him lasting fame and influence. One paragraph seems to cry out for repetition here: Foxe's life and work had many facets; he was Foxe the Historiographer, the Martyrologist, the Humanist, the Erasmian, the Puritan, the Anglican, the Elizabethan Eusebius, the Gospeller, the ecclesiologist, the Erastian, the precursor of Elizabethan nationalism, the Lutheran, and so on. If any of these are enlarged at the expense of the others, or if any single one is considered without reference to the rest, then the true picure of him is distorted. His greatness was that many were his masters but he was the disciple of none. . . . The writings of Foxe reveal that he was an independent thinker in his relationship both to the Continental Reformers and to the Elizabethan Divines (p. 29). It is to be recognized that such diversified qualities make Foxe a difficult subject for modem historians, and not many have been attracted to him in our century. Even the outline facts of his career have been left unfamiliar to most of us. For a modem narrative of his life we may safely rely on James Frederick Mozley, who has vindicated and utilized the sketch by Simeon Foxe published in 1641 but written thirty years earlier.' Since the martyrologist's career is likely to be unfamiliar to most readers, the salient facts may be usefully recorded here. The life of John Foxe extended from 1517 to 1587, thus occupying a period of vast and agonizing changes in the ecclesiastical orientation first of Germany and Switzerland and then of England and Scotland. He was born of undistinguished parents at Boston, Lincolnshire, and was still in his teens when Henry VIII withdrew England from the papal obedience (1534). In the same year Foxe entered Brasenose College, Oxford; 1. J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (London, 1940). Mozley's biographical section occupies pp. 1-117. Simeon Foxe's "Old Memoir" is described at the outset, pp. 1-11. Simeon, John Foxe's second son (1568-1642), was a distinguished physician and for seven years President of the Royal College of Physicians. He wrote the Memoir of his father in Latin about 1611 and later translated it. It was printed in the 1641 edition of the Martyrology and is more easily available in M. Hobart Seymour's edition (London, Edinburgh and Dublin, 1850), l:l-xix.