ABSTRACT
The Acts and Monuments had become an established classic, one of the most widely read, and widely known texts in Elizabethan England. This chapter explores whether there were indeed attempts by the ecclesiastical authorities, or by their nonconformist opponents, to claim the text as their own. Official intervention in the reproduction and marketing of Foxes work was clearest in a case from the 1580s: Timothy Bright's abridgement of the Acts and Monuments. Timothy Bright is one of those sixteenth-century figures who deserve a modern study devoted entirely to his remarkable life and work. He enjoyed careers as a doctor, author, clergyman, and stenographic innovator. Bright aimed to reproduce John Foxe whole. His abridgement was, or attempted to be, a true miniaturization of the whole of Foxe's Acts and Monuments rather than an extract of the high points. Bright's emphasis on England's particular role in church history seemed to illustrate William Haller's thesis admirably.
