'writers to solemnise and celebrate... Actes and memory': Foxe and the Business of Textual Memory

Abstract

One of the pervasive thematic interests throughout Foxe's narratives of captivity and torture is how human heroism can be memorialized adequately for succeeding generations who profess the reformist faith. In some prefatory remarks to the "Pandectae locorum communium" Foxe enquired: 'what can poets, what can historians, what can rhetoricians, and orators [...] provide by their art without memory [...]?'. This chapter explores a number of accounts of martyrdom across the chronological span of "The Actes and Monuments". It combines detailed analysis with a more general appreciation of early modern ideas on the implications of remembering. Particular attention is devoted to the narrative strategies Foxe deploys in his accounts of captivity, torture, and execution down the ages and how these might be seen to engage with prevailing sixteenth-century cultural discourses regarding the status and function of memory and the writing of history.