ABSTRACT
The first woodcut in Acts and Monuments of a person being burnt alive in England is one depicting the martyrdom of the Lollard William Sawter. One possible explanation for the massive textual response to Foxe's work is that it is the result of a tension embodied in Acts and Monuments between visibility and invisibility, "truth" and history that almost forces its readers to seek to shape or explain its meaning. Foxe's valorization of the invisible of the past as the "truth" of history is therefore predicated on a moment of extreme visibility. His history ends up concentrating on precisely those visible, particular differences that the universality of the act of martyrdom appears to make redundant. The mutually validating and authorizing relationship between image and word expressed in Foxe's account of Lambert's martyrdom relates directly to an unease over the ability of words or images to produce the "truth" of the martyr's suffering on their own.
