The Likeness of William Tyndale

Abstract

All likenesses of William Tyndale are posthumous and without iconographic authority. The first is the conventional woodcut rendering of him at the stake, published in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (London, 1563, and subsequent editions). The next is the engraving in Henry Holland's Heroologia (London, 1620). This is based on the woodcut of John Knox in the French translation by Simon Goulart of Theodorus Beza's Icones virorum illustrium (Geneva, 1581). On Holland's engraving are almost certainly based the painted portraits now in Hertford College, Oxford, and the collection of the Bible Society in Cambridge University Library.