ABSTRACT
Whatever else people know about Foxe's Acts and Monuments, they know it is a big book. Its massive physical presence, along with its spectacular woodcuts, carry its message as powerfully, and more memorably, than its carefully crafted narratives of the faithful witnessing to and suffering for Christ's true church. Foxe, of course, in 1563 had hailed print itself as a miraculous advent providentially designed "to subuert and ouerthrowe Anticriste", and in 1570, drawing upon an earlier Lutheran tract, De typographiae inventions, he expanded his praise of the new technology in a short section entitled, "The Benefit and Invention of Printing". The various canons and civic orders that required Acts and Monuments to be publicly set out date from 1571, so it appears that the 1570 edition was designed with individual readers in mind; notwithstanding, the price must have been considerable.
