ABSTRACT
Book of Martyrs was the familiar description in its own time, later Foxe's Book of Martyrs was more than a history of the Protestant martyrs of the reign of Queen Mary; rather a history of the Christian Church throughout its history, written from a martyrological and apocalyptical perspective. The late Geoffrey Elton wrote that the Book of Martyrs did not create a legend; it commemorated a truth'. The simple, Eltonian truth in this case would be that some of the star players in the story of the violent persecution of English Protestants just happened to be women. Shannon McSheffrey has argued that, contrary to what has often been suggested, women were not really very prominent in the heretical communities of the Lollards, and she scouts the traditional orthodoxy which connects women, especially, with enthusiastic religious deviance.
