Reforming the Mystical Body: From Mass to Martyr in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments

Abstract

While John Foxe’s sixteenth-century work Acts and Monuments is recognized as a foundational text for emergent English national identity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. Acts and Monuments renovates the social and sacramental concept of corpus mysticum , inherited from the Middle Ages, in Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative, producing a reformed English corpus mysticum . This argument reveals how the Tudor political theology of the mystical body perpetuated a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.