ABSTRACT
As a narrative of the building of true Church, Actes and Monuments provides the reader with an alternative to monarch-centered and patriarchal narratives of the English past. Foxe's account of the Reformation as a female history parallels his account of a popular Reformation, a conflation that had power to scandalize seventeenth-century conservatives, who would link the female preacher with the praying cobbler as emblems of social heresy. Aggrandizing female weakness, Foxe at once legitimizes female conscience by gendering it as male. Foxe uses the strategy of counterpointing regenerate nature with female weakness to celebrate and contain the spiritual empowerment of all of his female professors. Foxe's female monuments are enclosed within a text scripted by men, and, as Careless's commentary reveals, they are subject to both disclaimer and direct attack. While Foxe manipulates social orthodoxies to enhance the voice of Protestant conscience as a godly witness to the truth, the Catholic bishops invoke them to defame Protestant conscience.
