SOURCE: Woolf, D. R. “The Rhetoric of Martyrdom: Generic Contradiction and Narrative Strategy in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments.” In The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, edited by Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, pp. 243-82. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Woolf discusses Foxe's narrative strategy and explores problems of structure in the author's history of Protestant martyrs.

For oftentimes the will and pleasure of God is to beautifie and adorn his kingdom with the weake and simple instruments of this world: such as in the olde Testament Amos was, who with many other of obscure and unknowne names, were called from the heards and foldes to the honour of the prophets: as likewise we read of the Apostles that were called from Fishermens craft, and put into Churches.¹

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