SOURCE: Knott, John R. “John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering.” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 3 (fall 1996): 721-34.

In the following essay, Knott considers Foxe's focus on the “inward joy and peace of conscience” of the martyrs, noting that these sentiments appear to result from their awareness of the presence of God as well as their supporters on Earth.

John Foxe rejected the early Christian and medieval emphasis on the exceptional nature of martyrs and on the disjunction between vulnerable body and transported soul, focusing instead on the human qualities of his Protestant martyrs and the communal experience of the persecuted faithful, which becomes the locus of the sacred. He avoided the miraculous in attempting to reconcile representations of horrific suffering with traditional affirmations of the inner peace and joy of the martyr. Much of the drama of the Acts and Monuments arises from intrusions of the ordinary (the...