John Foxe was born in 1516 in Boston, England, at a time when reading the Bible in English could cost a person’s life. A studious boy, he preferred books to games and showed early the temperament of someone who would take his faith seriously for the rest of his life.
At sixteen he entered the University of Oxford, where he became a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1545 he resigned his position after embracing Protestant convictions incompatible with the college’s requirements, among them clerical celibacy.
He married Agnes Randall in 1547 and settled in London as a tutor and translator. When the Catholic queen Mary I came to the throne in 1553, Foxe had to flee England with his pregnant wife, fearing imprisonment.
In exile between Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and Basel, he lived through years of extreme poverty while gathering accounts of the persecution of Protestants. There he published, in Latin, the first draft of the work that would become his legacy.
Back in England after Mary I’s death, he published in 1563 the first English edition of Acts and Monuments, known as The Book of Martyrs. The work, running to nearly 1,800 pages, recounted in documentary detail the persecutions suffered by English Protestants.
Foxe wrote as an advocate for a cause, not as a neutral historian, and selected documents to reinforce the Protestant narrative. Later scholars pointed out errors, exaggerations, and omissions in the account, though modern research confirms that much of the documentation is genuine.
Ordained a priest in 1560, he turned down positions and offers of advancement in the church for reasons of conscience tied to his Puritan convictions, living modestly even after the success of his work.
Despite his harsh tone against religious persecution, Foxe also showed compassion for those who disagreed with him. In 1572 he interceded with the queen and personally visited Anabaptists condemned to be burned at the stake, pleading for clemency, but he could not prevent the execution of two of them.
He died in 1587, but Acts and Monuments continued to be read for centuries, shaping Protestant memory of suffering and faithfulness. It still inspires those who document and sustain persecuted Christians around the world today.
