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Article Excerpt
Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" and Early Modern Print Culture by John N. King. Cambridge U. Press, 2006. Pp. xvii + 351. $110.
Examining multiple copies of nine editions of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments--popularly known as the Book of Martyrs--John N. King attempts to explain "how this aggregation of documents came to exert a greater influence on the consciousness of early modern England than any other book aside from the English Bible and Book of Common Prayer" (2). The answer is deeply entwined with King's corrective understanding of Foxe as an "author-compiler" participating in what Robert Darnton has described as a "'communcations circuit' that interlinks the interests of the author.., to those of publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller, and reader" (14-15). For King, the popularity of Foxe's text owes much to the collaborative conditions of its meaning and reception, whereby "generations of purchasers, donors, librarians, abridgers, readers, and hearers have joined commentators and abridgers in shaping and reshaping different versions of this book into divergent forms" (15). Equally or more important were the unusually active efforts of Foxe and partners to adapt the text to changing political, economic, and social circumstances,...
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