Writing the Relic, Fetishising the Written: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments

Abstract

While John Foxe's Actes and Monuments propagates the early Protestants’ iconoclastic mindset, this magnum opus also presents the Protestant book as displacing the Catholic relic and exhibits a range of interconnected issues that allow for the book to be fetishized. In accordance with Luther's sola scriptura principle, Foxe attributes special significance to the written Word of God, but he extends this to include Protestant writing in general. It is precisely this focus on the written, combined with a general disdain for any kind of oral transmission, that gives rise to a new order of disembodied saints whose written legacies are venerated in place of their bodily remains. This essay examines how this displacement is manifested in Foxe's compilation and how this book establishes itself as the ultimate monument attesting not only to the martyrs’ steadfastness but also and chiefly to the spirit's triumph over the fallible flesh.