ABSTRACT
Many of the Protestant martyrs featured in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments are prolific writers. In recent years, as readers have sought the authentic voices of early modern women, interest in Askew has grown among both literary critics and historians, and analyses of her text have become prevalent. This chapter constitutes a reconsideration of the part played by Askew's first editors, Bale and Foxe, as collaborators in the work now known as The Examinations of Anne Askew. Foxe displays great skill and sensitivity in creating female "characters" in his martyrology based on accounts of women martyrs in his possession. In the Acts and Monuments, Foxe goes into remarkable depth about many martyrs' lives, presumably in order to emphasize their authentic subjectivity, their realness, and thus underline the fact that their stories constitute history superior in value and importance to fanciful saints' lives like those contained in the Golden Legend.
