ABSTRACT
The illustrations in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments provide some of the most familiar images of the English Protestant tradition. The polemical power of the illustrations from Foxe can be attested in numerous ways, from the anecdotal to the circumstantial. The story of the Protestant illustrative tradition begins, appropriately enough, with Martin Luther and Wittenberg. Luther regarded his German Bible translation as his greatest achievement – he once said that it was the only one of his books which he believed deserved to outlive him. From the middle years of the sixteenth century it was Calvin's voice that became increasingly dominant in the mainstream evangelical movement, particularly in the lands of northern Europe where the first generation of reform had been arrested and turned back. In France the impact of Calvinism would be no less profound, though circumstances had intervened to shape the development of a robust indigenous tradition of Bible illustration from a much earlier date.
