benedict s.

robinson

Neither Acts Nor Monuments

enlr_1078

3..30

The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives. It begins with the printer. Jacques Derrida1

he most striking structural aspect of John Foxes Actes and Monumentes, Mark Breitenberg has written, is its vast inclusion of seemingly heterogeneous materials, including letters, royal statutes, parliamentary acts, sermons, excerpts from medieval chronicles, transcripts of trials and depositions and interrogations, and so on.2 The book that circulates under the name John Foxe overwhelmingly consists of other peoples words edited, arranged, and presented by Foxe, who appears less as the author of a historical narrative than as a nearly obsessive collector of historical documents, the curator of an archive of materials concerning the history of the English church.3 The printed book assembles in its pages the materials of a Protestant memory, the monuments of its past: it assembles texts that are both markers of past time and promises to the future, injunctions to memory and to the continued labor of maintaining faith to the true church of Christ; and it understands those texts in their full materiality as documents, as textual objects to be rescued and collected.

David Scott Kastan introduced me to Foxe; his inuence on this paper should be very clear. An early version of the argument was presented at a panel organized by Thomas Freeman at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2003. Since then, it has developed thanks to insightful responses from Freeman, Zack Lesser, Alan Farmer, and the English Literary Renaissance readers. 1. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, tr. Eric Prenowitz (1995; Chicago, 1996), p. 18. 2. The Flesh Made Word: Foxes Acts and Monuments, Renaissance and Reformation 25.4 (1989), 389. 3. Patrick Collinson calls Foxe a kind of registrar of original documents, not a narrative historian, in Truth and Legend: the Veracity of John Foxes Book of Martyrs, in Clios Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse (Zutphen, 1985), p. 34.

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Print enables the production of this archive, an archive that, in its totality, has no real existence except in the pages of Foxes book. In this, the Actes and Monumentes responds to a felt absence in sixteenth-century England: the absence of a real repository of English historical texts.4 The printed book offers itself as a kind of ark of salvaged manuscripts. And yet it also interposes a level of mediation between this archive of rescued texts and the reader, as the printed page both reproduces and displaces the documents it transmits. The fact of print publication necessarily separates us from the manuscript archive even in the act of producing it. In a sense the sheer accumulation of documentary material in Actes and Monumentes conceals the books contrary impulse to disappear, to efface itself, as the inevitable but unwanted intermediary between the reader and the archive: if in Derridas words archivable meaning is codetermined by the structure that archives, that is, by the printed page, it also remains possible to dream of something beyond the ponderous archiving machine of print, an archive that erases itself so as to let the origin present itself . . . without mediation and without delay, without even the memory of a translation.5 If we attend to its presentation of the manuscript document, we can catch the Actes and Monumentes dreaming of such an unmediated, perfect archival reproduction. Recognizing a struggle between the books archival impulse and the medium of its transmission also offers a corrective to one of the central dogmas of Reformation studies: that Protestantisms emphasis on the individual believers encounter with Scripture fostered a triumphal afliation with the new technology of print. At times the very conventionality of this claim produces what looks like a certain embarrassment about it: Jesse Lander calls it a textbook truism, Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman, something of a clich.6 The Reformers themselves of course are partly
4. Foxe had access to a number of private collections, perhaps most notably those of Matthew Parker and John Bale, on which see my article, Darke speech: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History, Sixteenth Century Journal 29:4 (1998), 106466. See also Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge, Eng., 1998); also the forthcoming book by Thomas S. Freeman and Elizabeth Evenden, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxes Book of Martyrs (Cambridge, Eng., 2011). 5. Derrida, pp. 8, 93. 6. Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Eng., 2006), p. 6; Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, John Foxe, John Day and the Printing of the Book of Martyrs, in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book
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responsible for this situation, since they proclaimed their own celebratory relationship with print. Thus, in a famous passage in the 1570 edition of Actes and Monumentes, Foxe describes the invention of the printing press as a providential act. God opened the presse to preache, he writes, whose voyce the pope is neuer able to stoppe with all the puissance of his triple crown.7 The Reformation, it seems, is a revolution of the book, a revolution that Foxes own monumental book both announces and embodies. And yet for all of Foxes ringing assertion of the presss function in spreading the gospel, he articulates that function through metaphors of orality. God has opened the press to preache, and now the pope seeks to silence this new voyce. By printing, as by the gifte of tongues, . . . the Gospell soundeth to all nations & countreys vnder heauen. The metaphors here seem to retract what the text asserts, reinscribing the printed word into the framework of the oral word, the sermon. Moreover, the comparison to the gifte of tonguesitself hardly unproblematiccenters precisely on the inefcacy of reading in matters of faith: the holy Ghost speaketh to the aduersaries in innumerable sortes of bookes, yet they will not be conuerted.8 The miraculous voice of the press seems destined to fall on deaf ears, unable to guarantee that it will nd what Foxe calls true disposed mindes.9 In fact, the print market itself threatens to drown Gods word in a mass of other words, the innite multitude of bookes with which the public is pestred: I doubt not, but many do both perceiue, & inwardly bewayle this insatiable boldness of many now a dayes, both in writyng and printyng, he states, which to say the truth, for my part I do as much lament as any man els. Foxe describes himself as both bashfull and fearefull at the prospect of publishing, a combination of embarrassment, anxiety, and discomfort that hardly speaks to an easy condence in the light brought into the world by print.10
Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London, 2002), p. 23. Both do qualify the usual narrative. Cf. also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York, 2000), p. 1. 7. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5. Because the signatures of the various editions distinguish between upper- and lower-casei.e., Dd precedes DDI will write them out in full. 8. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5. 9. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. [p]2. 10. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *3. See also Susan Felch,Shaping the Reader in the Acts and Monuments, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), p. 59.
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When Protestant doctrine insists on the necessity of the believers encounter with Gods word, the privileged mode of this encounter is not reading but listening, its medium not the book but the sermon. An image on the frontispiece of Foxes book that has several times been interpreted as asserting the centrality of print to Protestantism thus tells a more complicated story. In the bottom left-hand corner of the page, a crowd of people gathers around a pulpit to listen to a sermon. Three gures in the crowd are holding books. In this graphic representation of the community of belief, the book replaces the beads and icons so visibly held by the Catholic gures in a parallel panel to the right. It seems to be an iconic representation of a Protestant church dened by the shared hermeneutic labor of receiving Gods word through the twin media of the pulpit and the press. But this image notably does not depict the scene of solitary reading so routinely conjured up by modern accounts of Protestant scripturalismas, for example, when Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker discover, at the core of Protestant doctrine, the individual Christian struggling alone with faith and the word in a particular and individual experience of the text.11 The gures in Foxes image are decidedly not struggling alone: instead, the image situates the encounter with the book in the purview of the preached word.12 Whatever reading may be taking place in this crowd is presumably a kind of reading along, a practice in which the terms of the reading are being set by the preacher.13 Similarly, in mainstream Protestant theology, sola scriptura emphatically did not mean a purely individual reading but rather a reading with the congregation
11. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader, in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Sharpe and Zwicker, (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), p. 11. 12. On this image see Patrick Collinson, The Coherence of the Text: How it Hangeth Together: The Bible in Reformation England, in The Bible, the Reformation, and the Church: Essays in Honour of James Atkinson, ed. W. P. Stephens (Shefeld, 1995), pp. 10607, and Peter Stallybrass, Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible, in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 63. 13. Of such scenes Stallybrass writes, on the contrary, that the congregation is encouraged to bring their bibles to church and to check the preachers interpretation against their own reading of the text (Stallybrass, Books and Scrolls, p. 63). And yet Protestant accounts of scriptural reading often insist that reading is secondary to hearing the preached word: see D.F. McKenzie, Speech-Manuscript-Print, in New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford (Austin, 1990), p. 91, and below. See also Alexandra Walsham, Domme Preachers? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print, Past and Present 168.1 (2000), 72123.
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in which private judgments were mediated by the community of the faithful with its appointed ministers and guides.14 The doctrine of sola scriptura is perfectly compatible with a real nervousness about a practice of reading in which the encounter with the text is exclusively an encounter with the silent, printed word, a solitary and potentially wayward reading concretized in Foxes worry about the secrete iudgements of readers.15 We can go still further and notice that the images most condent depiction of the transmission of Gods word takes place neither in the scene of reading nor in that of preaching, but in a tableau in the corner in which a small group turns toward a blazing sun on which are inscribed the four letters of the tetragrammaton. Here we see the absolute encounter with the name of God in a scene of reading that requires no book at alla scene of reading that is also a not-reading, because those four letters do not call for interpretation but only for worship, and because those letters themselves signify the limits of language, the inexpressibility of the divine, in the prohibition on fully writing Gods name.16 The tetragrammaton marks the absolute cleavage between the divine word and human language. But what is the relationship between this spiritualized depiction of a genuinely divine transmission of the word and the rest of the image? Does it gloss for us what is happening in the crowd at the sermon, or among the readers in that crowd, or are these scenes of reception in tension, the one idealizing, abstracting, and correcting the other? The more we study the image, the less condent it seems about the means through which Gods word can be transmitted to the faithful. A similar ambivalence marks the relations between print and manuscript throughout the Actes and Monumentes. To understand this books relationship to its own medium, we need to look beyond those few
14. Michael S. Harton, Theologies of Scripture in the Reformation and CounterReformation: An Introduction, in Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Justin S. Holcomb (New York, 2006), p. 89: faithful reading requires the Church as its proper context and medium. See also Felch, Shaping the Reader, pp. 5657, 64; and Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality:The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville, 1993), pp. 36, 41. 15. Actes and Monumentes (1570) sig. *3. See Felch, Shaping the Reader, pp. 5257; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, 2000), p. 328; and Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality, pp. 7, 16, 24, 28. 16. See Ryan Netzley,The End of Reading:The Practice and Possibility of Reading Foxes Actes and Monuments, ELH 73 (2006), 187, 209.
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passages where Foxe explicitly addresses print and think instead about the ways in which a relationship to print is structured into the very form of the book on its every page. If we do so, we will recognize a fundamental, structural fact of this book: that its real epistemological ground lies not so much in the diuine and miraculous press, but in the manuscript archive it seeks to bring into being. The incorporation of so many documents and transcripts remains one of the most crucial formal features of this book, one that testies to a deep commitment to the archiveor to an idea of the archiveas the evidentiary basis of the story it tells. Foxe and his collaborators manipulate the typographical codes of the printed page in order to conjure the archive into existence on that page, constructing a visual and verbal rhetoric that functions as though the page could be made transparent to the document, as though we could look through the veil of print into the imaginary archive underlying and underwriting it. In this way the archive is both produced by the printed page and struggles against it: the Actes and Monumentes uses print against itself, to present the illusion of an unmediated access to the manuscript materials of English ecclesiastical history.17 It is tempting to think in terms of an ambivalence about print that we can attribute to Foxe himself; but this remains unknowable. The Actes and Monumentes was a massively collaborative project, involving a network of scholars, copyists, researchers, and informants.18 To write about the book is to write about this network, as well as about its publisher John Day and all the peoplecompositors, printers, proofreaders, woodcut artistswho helped shape the book as we have it. Questions of typography and page layout in particular open up a real uncertainty about agency: although Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas Freeman have suggested that available manuscript evidence demonstrates Foxes editorial control not just of the content but of the physical layout of the page, we clearly cannot think that all such decisions can be referred to Foxeas Freeman himself has subse17. In this, the Actes and Monumentes bears comparison to other, more or less contemporary efforts to amass, out of disparate documents, the materials of a comprehensive history: the work of Raphael Holinshed, or that of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, bears comparison with that of Foxe in their encyclopedic tendencies and their documentary labor. And yet the problems of a Protestant hermeneutics also mark Foxes project in very particular ways. 18. Devorah Greenberg,Community of the Texts: Producing the First and Second Editions of Acts and Monuments, Sixteenth Century Journal 36.3 (2005), 695715.
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quently pointed out.19 Nor do we need to. My argument here does not require imagining that the features of the book I will discuss must be motivated by the feelings of any single individual; rather, I take the evocation of such feelings to be a part of the way the book solicits the psychic investments of its readers. What I hope to describe is something structured into the whole project of the Actes and Monumentes, the necessary effect of an ambition to produce in print an archive of manuscript material relating to the history of religious persecution. If at times I write about Foxesince this history regularly speaks in a personal authorial voice, especially when discussing the work of collecting and compiling documentsI emphasize the structural aspects of this relationship between the printed book and the manuscript archive. What I hope to reveal in this way is something fundamental about the books project, and what that in turn can tell us about the wider story of print and Protestantism.

ii
The archival document became a crucial issue in the polemical battles that followed the publication of the rst English edition of Actes and Monumentes in 1563. The Catholic counterattack was signicantly directed against the books handling of evidence, charging Foxe with having distorted, manipulated, or falsied documentsas though, as he bitterly writes, there were no histories els in all the world corrupted, but onely this story of Actes and Monumentes.20 The history of such charges occupies the bulk of the 1570 dedication to Elizabeth in which Foxe takes up a complex stance, at once acknowledging that the 1563 edition contained errors, asserting that many of them were xed in the process of proofreading the text, and challenging the motives of his attackers in singling out these errors in the rst place.21 In the struggle to provide English Protestantism with a genealogy, a long prehistory extending all the way back to primitive Christianity, the possibility of

19. Modern 20. 21.

Evenden and Freeman, John Foxe, p. 39; Freeman, Foxes Book of Martyrs and Early Print Culture (Review), The Library 8.2 (2007), 198203. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *1v. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *1*2.

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error became a charged issue.The truth of this narrative was something to be fought over in its every detail.22 It is easy to think that the polemic about errors in the Actes and Monumentes willfully turns the discussion to minute particulars and fails to engage the book at the level of its larger claims; but I want to suggest that the Catholic polemicists seized on something essential to this project: the necessary contradiction of an archival impulse as it translates itself into printthe problem of mediation.This is a question that obsesses the book as well, motivating a continual emphasis on the very real, concrete physicality of its documentary sources, on their vulnerable materiality, and on the historiographical labor of nding, transcribing, and publishing them. Whenever he can, Foxe emphasizes the autograph document underlying the printed page, as when he offers us the examinations of Richard Woodman written and penned with his owne hande, or those of Richard Crasheeld set forth and written with his owne hande, or a letter of Edmund Bonners Out of Boners owne hande writing.23 Behind the printed page we have the handwritten document, the personal testimony. At times, he invites us to marvel at the fact that anything has survived to be read at all. Offering the reader the letters of John Philpot, penned & written with hys owne hand while he was in prison, for example, Foxe writes that the letters have been maruelously reserued from Philpots enemies, who sought not onely to stoppe him from all wryting, but also to spoile and depriue him of that which he had written. In a poignant scene we are told that, although Philpot was many times stripped and searched, these hys wrytings were conueyed and hid in places about him, and so were saved, although Philpot was not.24 This emphasis on the difculty of the work of textual reclamation only intensies in those sections of the book dealing with the more distant past. In one case Foxe observes that the signatures at the end of a set of letters thorowe the antiquitie are so blotted that they could
22. On the controversy over Foxes book, see Evenden and Freeman, John Foxe, pp. 4041; Glyn Parry, John Foxe, Father of Lyes, and the Papists, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 295305; and Ceri Sullivan, Oppressed by the Force of Truth: Robert Persons Edits John Foxe, in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. David Loades (Brookeld, 1999), pp. 15466. 23. Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. BBBB4, EEEE5r; 1570, EEE3. 24. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. YYYY2v.
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not be red.25 Of another text he writes that it appears to be of an old and auncient wryting, both by the forme of ye characters and by ye wearing of ye Partchment, almost consumed by length of yeares and tyme.26 The semi-legible, half-destroyed text is called upon to testify to its truth through the very damage it has suffered. Even the lacunae of the text constitute a kind of evidence of antiquity and authenticity, and so Foxe points them out, as when he notes in the margin of a letter written by Innocent III, Some thyng lacketh here in our copy.27 The difculty of reading the document becomes a sign of its value, as is suggested strikingly by the handling of a set of Anglo-Saxon materials as part of the history of transubstantiation. The point of this discussion is to show that this doctrine had not been preached in the English church since time immemorial, and that it was possible to trace a history through which it displaced earlier eucharistic doctrines. Foxe offers the documents of this history in both English and AngloSaxon, the latter in a font recently cast at Matthew Parkers expense.28 The Anglo-Saxon was literally unreadable, for all but a few scholars, as is clear from the inclusion of an Anglo-Saxon alphabet at the head of one of the documents; it seems doubtful that Foxe himself could read it.29 The Anglo-Saxon is included precisely for its visual strangeness, its immediately visible antiquity, which in itself constitutes a silent claim to truth.30 Age, the vulnerable physical condition of the text, and even its illegibility become part of an archival rhetoric that enlists the fragility and rarity of its manuscript sources as a prime index of their testamentary value.31 This is no doubt obvious to anyone who has spent
25. Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. S5v. 26. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. MMM1v. 27. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. M5v. 28. See my Darke Speech, 1061. 29. Greenberg, Community of the Texts, 713. 30. This Anglo-Saxon material is also one of the places where we can catch Foxe in all of his tendentious willingness to distort history, emending his documents in order to make them conform more closely to the story he wants to tell. See John Bromwich, The First Book Printed in Anglo-Saxon Types, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society 2 (195963), 26591, and my essay, John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons, in John Foxe and His World, ed. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 5472. On the question of documentary truth in the Actes and Monumentes, see below. 31. Even in the case of texts set from prior printed versions, Foxe labors to present a history of transmission through which the printed text nevertheless maintains its connection with a manuscript exemplar. Of a work by William Thorpe, for example, he notes that he has taken his
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time with the Actes and Monumentes, and yet it seems worth pausing over, for the emphasis on the document as a physical thing, an object, and not simply a text to be quoted. In this attentiveness to the physical being of its sources, the Actes and Monumentes reveals a feeling for the fragility of paper and ink, for the vulnerability of the textual object. The labor of scholarly research among the monuments of antiquity continually intrudes into the narrative, even becoming itself evidence of the operation of providence. Of the letter from Innocent III cited earlier, for example, Foxe writes that the copy . . . by chaunce, yea not by chaunce but by the oportune sendyng of God, came to my handes, as I was pennyng this present story, writen in the end of an old parchment boke, & otherwise rare I suppose to be founde.32 The process of research has become a part of this history, the scholars discovery a message from God. The fragility of these textual objects evokes the intolerable but very real possibility that Gods message will be lost through the callousness of a humanity that fails to preserve and treasure these fragments and signs of Gods care. The Actes and Monumentes solicits a kind of scholars pathos, an impulse to preserve what is threatened by loss. This concern for the document as an object whose vulnerability is a signicant part of its value and meaning motivates a typographical labor to make the manuscript document visible on the printed page.33 When the Actes and Monumentes includes letters, proclamations, statutes, sermons, or trial transcripts, those materials are marked off from the rest of the text through a series of varying typographical codes, often including the use of spacing, titles, pilcrows, and changes of typeface or font.34 This, too, is something undoubtedly so familiar to Foxe scholars that no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to say much about it. All of these typographical signals serve to guide the reader through the massive labyrinth of this book; but above all they work to
text from a transcript published by William Tyndale, writing that though the saide Maister Tindall did somwhat amend Thorpes English and frame it after our maner, this work of modernization was not fully accomplished in all wordes, so that some thing dooth remaine, sauering the old speeche of that time. See Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. O6; for Tyndales edition, see The examinacion of Master William Thorpe (Antwerp, 1530). 32. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. M5. 33. On typography and the relationship between print, manuscript, and speech, see McKenzie, Speech-Manuscript-Print, pp. 101, 108. 34. On the pilcrow, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2001), p. 117.
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separate the document on the page, graphically producing it as an object distinct from the surrounding text. The layout of Foxes wild typographic page is undoubtedly a part of the meaning of the Actes and Monumentes, part of its signicance as an expressive form, in D.F. McKenzies famous phrase.35 Of course this does not mean that every typographical feature is susceptible to interpretation; there are clearly quotidian pressures of space, for example, that shape decisions about layout. Nevertheless, the broad patterns of typography and layout suggest a sustained thinking about the document, its translation onto the printed page, and the problems produced by that process of translationwhether that thinking can nally be ascribed to Foxe himself, to John Day, the books compositors, or to some collaboration of all of these people, in the effort to salvage and disseminate the materials of English Protestant history. In the 1563 edition, for example, Latin documents are generally set across both columns of the page, so that they interrupt the normal experience of reading, the normal movement of the eye along each column successively.This interruption forces a kind of attention to the Latin text as something obeying its own, distinct logic; in effect, separate spatial rules govern the Latin text and the rest of the page (3c 5v). The immediate impression is of the Latin document as a distinct object, an integral, whole thing in its own right. Absent the division into columns that is the governing structure of the page, we seem to be invited not simply to read the letter but to see it, as though it were physically there before us.36 Visibility is, in fact, the primary language through which Foxe presents the document: he continually writes of showing or exhibiting the document, of inserting it into the book, as
35. Netzley, The End of Reading, 203; D. F. McKenzie, Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve, in Making Meaning: Printers of the Mind and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael K. Suarez (Amherst, 2002), pp. 198236, and Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), pp. 929. See also Evelyn B. Tribble, The Peopled Page: Polemic, Confutation, and Foxes Book of Martyrs, in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 10922, and David Scott Kastan, The noyse of the new Bible: Reform and Reaction in Henrician England, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), pp. 4668. 36. On this practice, see also John King, Foxes Book of Martyrs and the History of the Book, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.2 (2004), 17576. King argues that this signals a hybridization of the page formats of vernacular and humanist books, and thus suggests a kind of fusing of vernacular and elite readerships, an argument he also extends to the use of black letter and italic or roman fonts (pp. 178, 180).
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though the thing itself were here present.37 The choice to print both Latin and English versions of such documents suggests this desire to make the documentary original present on the page as a kind of thing. The rst version of Actes and Monumentes, after all, was entirely in Latin; the decision to produce the 1563 edition and all subsequent editions in English was motivated by the concern to discover a wider vernacular readership. In the English Actes and Monumentes, the Latin like the Anglo-Saxonappears alongside its translation as proof of Foxes delity for those who can read the evidence; but for the vernacular reader who is the particular target of this book, the Latin necessarily appears as a kind of mute testimony, an illegible text that in its very illegibility becomes a thing to be looked at. The 1570 edition develops its own repertoire of visual and typographical codes for marking its documents, including spacing, titles, pilcrows, lines of quotation marks in the margin, andincreasingly the use of distinct typefaces or fonts.38 While its procedures are less regular than those of the 1563 edition, it looks as though the 1570 edition becomes increasingly concerned with the use of typography and layout to mark off the document, and that this concern for the handling of the document is still further extended in the 1583 edition, which signicantly stabilizes its documentary typography. For example, in the case of two letters, one from Edward VI and one from the Earl of Warwick, concerning whether John Hooper should be allowed to take a bishopric without conforming in regard to clerical vestments and certain other ceremonial usages, the 1570 edition sets both in a smaller typeface, in blocks of text separated by a space from what precedes and follows them; both begin with drop capitals; and both are laid out on the page so as visually to recall the layout of a letter, with the signature lines set against the right margin. The rst of the two letters is further introduced with a headingin romanalong with a pilcrow indicating the commencement of something new. A marginal
37. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1563), sig. HHHh2v (as by the reading thereof thou mayest see and perceaue more at large); (1570), sig. B1v (let euerye man iudge, which seeth this letter), sig. L4v (which letter, as he wrote the same, here vnder followeth to be seene), sig. MMM2 (this Latine epistle aboue exhibited, inserted), and sig. ZZZ4 (as it came newly to our hands, I thought here to exhibite vnto ye world). 38. There are a few cases in which the 1570 text reverts to the 1563 editions practice of presenting material across both columns; see, e.g., sigs. TTt2 and LL2v. But generally this becomes a practice for marking rhetorically signicant moments of Foxes own narrative, not a way of presenting documents.
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notation identifying the letter and a column of quotation marks appear in the left margin (4R lv). The 1583 edition retains many of these features, but in addition sets both letters in roman type, underscoring their difference from the black-letter text of the rest of the page (4S 4).39 Letters generally provide the best evidence of this typographical solicitude for the document: through the use of white space, layout, and font or typeface changes, they are often presented with a careful attention to their graphic elements. One of the more remarkable features of the reproduced letter is the signature line, which is often set at the right margin, presumably imitating the spatial organization of the manuscript letter itself; the signature is thus a prime indicator of the effort visually or graphically to imitate the physical document. But the inclusion of a printed signature raises with striking clarity the whole problem of print mediation: the most personal kind of script, the signed name that authorizes the whole documentI. Warwikeis subjected to the regularizing anonymity of print. Nowhere is the chasm between print and manuscript more evident. The very point of authorization, the point where the writing self signs itselfand thus the point that the Actes and Monumentes most wants to captureescapes it even in the moment of reproduction.The pathos of this can be seen in the case of a letter sent by Heinrich Bullinger to John Hooper, now in prison under Queen Mary, and signed, You know the hand, H.B.40 The allusion to the familiarity of a known handwriting evokes the concrete, physical being of this piece of text and the intimacy of an exchange of personal letters: a concreteness and an intimacy that, like Bullingers hand itself, are necessarily missing from the printed page. Perhaps the most visually striking use of typography to mark a document appears near the beginning of the second volume of the 1570 edition, when a letter written from an Italian martyr to his most dearely beloued brethren is presented enclosed within an elaborate type border. While unique, this moment nevertheless emblematizes the concerns of this typography: it is a question, here very clearly, of the edges of the text, of its borders, of an attention to the boundary that
39. On the changing meanings of typefaces in the late sixteenth century, see Mark Bland, The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England, TEXT 11 (1998), 93107. 40. Actes and Monumentes (1583), sig. 4T 5.
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enables the presentation of the document as a distinct and integral thing. It is as though the printed page were a kind of opening onto something else altogether, a monument of antiquity conceived in its full being as a textual object, vulnerable to loss but here rescued and disseminated to a print readership. In all of these distinct ways the various editions reveal an attentiveness to the document as a material object and seek to give place to that object on the printed page. But Foxe is actually quite cagey in the promises he makes when he describes the textual relationship of his reproduced documents to their exemplars. Most commonly, he offers the tenor or the effecte of a particular text, words that suggest delity to the texts general meaning, but not to its exact words.41 At other times he promises the forme and tenor or the forme and effecte, a phrasing that suggests a more sustained faithfulness; still more rarely, he claims to offer the document worde for worde.42 The distinction between forme and tenor perhaps corresponds to something like a distinction between the general drift or substance of a text and the particulars of its manifestation as a document. It is clearly not possible to press this language for anything like a theory of editing, but I am tempted to compare Foxes notion of forme to W.W. Gregs concept of accidentals, all of those non-substantive markers that can freely be emended by an editor without impairing the real meaning of the text: all those elements that Greg imagined as contributing to the texts formal presentation.43 The concept of forme in the Actes and Monumentes seems to signify all of the features of the text as a material document, from handwriting to the shapes of the letters to the archaic syntactical and lexical features of the language to the condition of the paper and the ink.While it does not contribute to the overall meaning of the document, forme is everything that nevertheless marks it or signs it as an historically embedded object. As such,forme is for Foxe at once dispensable and absolutely essential. It does not participate in the substantive content of the text, but it identies that text as a monument of antiquity and thus validates its evidentiary value.When Foxe claims to have copied his documents from autograph manuscripts
41. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. f4, p2, q1. 42. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. v3, Qq6 (forme and tenor, forme and tenour), sig. x6 (forme and effecte), sig. Ss3v (worde for worde), and sig. Qq6 and Qq6v (word by word). 43. W.W. Greg, The Rationale of Copy-Text, Studies in Bibliography 3 (195051), 21.
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written in the old speeche of that time, when he describes the physical condition of those manuscripts, the barely legible writing contained in them, or the ancient English in which they appear, he testies to a value that he locates in the forme of the document as a document, a value that has nothing to do with its meaning but concerns its outer, material existence, its thingness.44 This of course is exactly what print can never transmit: the document as document is precisely what is lost, and this dilemma is what motivates Foxes frequent descriptions of the physical condition of his documentary sources.The problem of print mediation can be traced in what is certainly the keyword of the archival vocabulary of the Actes and Monumentes, copy. The book constantly offers its readers the copy of a given document, using that word in its most relevant meaning of transcript, reproduction.45 In this sense the word signals the distance of the printed text from the manuscript original, perhaps evoking a process of textual transmission with several stages, including the labor of copying the text by hand, inserting it into a manuscript narrative, and nally the printers work of setting that narrative into type. Between the printed text and the originary source, in other words, obtrude other, more shadowy objects such as the transcript, the notebook, or the manuscript prepared for the press.46 But copy is a word that can bear seemingly antithetical interpretations. It could mean any kind of imitation, and as such evoked a wide range of mimetic and artistic practices, includingby way of its Latin root copiathe techniques of humanist rhetoric, with their basis in artful expansion. Through idiomatic expressions such as to change ones copy or to copy a countenance, the word folded into itself a whole early modern epistemological suspicion of mimesis, opening up the possibility of distortion, pretense, lying, the circulation of fraudulent or corrupted copies such as the stolne, and surreptitious copies of Shakespeares plays famously condemned by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio.47 But at the same time,
44. Actes and Monumentes (1563) sig. O6. 45. E.g., Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. g2, t6, Qq6v. 46. Substantial collections of Foxes manuscripts remain; see Thomas S. Freemans ODNB (2004) entry, Foxe, John (1516/171587), subsection entitled Samuel Foxe and his fathers papers. See also Ralph Hanna, An Oxford Library Interlude: The Manuscripts of John Foxe the Martyrologist, Bodleian Library Record 17.5 (2002), 31426, and Collinson, Truth and Legend, pp. 35, 51n. 30. 47. Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), sig. A3.
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copy could also mean original, not the copy but the thing copied: this is what it would have meant in John Days shop, where the copy would have been the manuscript that was being set into print orby abstractionthe exclusive legal right to publish that manuscript, as formalized by an entry in the Stationers Register. Foxe repeatedly uses copy to designate his manuscript originals, as for example when he tells us that he discovered The copye of a papal bull in an olde written monument, or when he claims to quote from the copie of Boners owne letters by his owne hand writing, which I haue to shewe, or when he judges the age of a document by the condition of the copie.48 In all of these cases the copy is precisely the manuscript, the thing that Foxe or one of his correspondents has perhaps copied in a transcript that has in turn served as copy in Days print shop before being presented in the printed pages of the Actes and Monumentes as the copy of an old document. What is Foxe claiming to give us, when he gives us copies? How close to the source is he promising to bring us? The word he uses to present his documents can be used to designate every single stage of their transmission into print, and as such contains in miniature the whole paradox of his project.

iii
The problem of mediation is evoked even in the title by which this book is generally known, Actes and Monumentes. The Actes here are the acts of the martyrs whose lives and deaths the book narrates, acts that testify to a true church of the faithful existing in unbroken continuity from the Roman persecutions right through to the late medieval heretics and the early modern Protestants who claimed their legacya church none the less true for having no material, institutional reality except as instantiated in those acts. Foxe is intensely aware of the paradoxes of trying to write a church history without a visible church, that is, the effort to write a church history based only on the scattered and ephemeral experiences of the elect, a church history
48. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sigs. Vv6v, EEE4 (marginal note), MMM2. On the word copy and its idiomatic uses, see OED; also, Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 2000), p. 105.
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founded on events and not on institutions.49 That awareness produces an odd rhetorical balancing act on the question of the true churchs visibility. The books whole project would seem to be an effort to make that church visible, to bring it into the light, to show its history and to testify to its truth. Recent discussions of the iconicity of the physical Actes and Monumentes have emphasized precisely this striving for a monumental visibility.50 But such visibility is also tainted by the legacy of the Catholic past. For the early Reformers, visibility in the sense of embodied institutional existence slides easily into an idolatrous or fetishistic attachment to things. If the Catholic church has been the only visible Christian church for over a thousand years, that visibility signies for Foxe a diabolical commitment to gaudy shows, to ceremonies, and to wealth and power. Against the visibility of the Catholic church, Foxe imagines the true church as something spectral, a ghostly presence in the world. Most people, he writes, beholding the Church of Rome to be so visible and glorious in the eyes of the world, so shinyng in outward beauty, have supposed the same to be onely the right Catholicke mother. The church of the martyrs, because it was not so visibly knowne in the worlde, was disregarded. And yet, although the right Church of God be not so inuisible in the world, that none can see it: yet neither is it so visible agayne that euery worldly eye may perceaue it. For like as is the nature of truth: so is the proper condition of the true Church, that commonly none seeth it, but such only as be the members and partakers therof ([p]3). In this spectral ecclesiology the true church seems to icker in and out of existence, or to leave only shadowy traces in the world, traces that can only be recognized by true disposed mindes ([p]2). Everything seems to depend on a metaphorics of seeing, testifying, and witnessing, which brings the history of the true church into the light of day and convicts the Catholic church of offering only a specious externality. The book offers us the Actes of its martyrs, acts that are themselves testimonies, witnesses of the true church. The word martyr means witness, and the acts of these martyrs both testify to the reality of the true faith and invite us to witness that reality, to
49. Susan Felch writes that the true reader can see in the pages of Acts and Monuments the invisible Church made visible (Shaping the Reader, p. 61). 50. Breitenberg, The Flesh Made Word; Kastan, Little Foxes, in John Foxe and His World, pp. 11732, and Size Matters, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), 14953.
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see it bodied forth in their mutilated bodies, whicheven as literally made visible in the books woodcutsbecome in effect surrogates for the physical continuity, the physical and material being, of the instituted and visible Catholic church. But in basing his church history on the acts of martyrs, Foxe opts for a paradoxical kind of visibility. After all, the acts he chronicles are acts of oblivion, disappearances, deaths. What Foxe narrates over and over is the calm acceptance of a violent dissolution of the self, a willing abandonment of the world, an embrace of spiritual power in the experience of total worldly disempowerment. We are invited to see, but what we are invited to see are ghosts. The shadowiness of such Actes promises to be stabilized in Foxes title by the offer of Monumentes, a word Foxe uses in much the same way as Spenser uses the word moniments, in Book II of The Faerie Queene.51 Monuments are records, histories, testimonies of past time, but alsoparticularly by way of Spensers spelling admonishments, reminders of the labor we must undertake in the present to remain faithful to the past and to realize its promise for the future.They are also records imagined in their full materiality as papers, books, objects vulnerable to the depredations of time. When, in the House of Alma, Guyon discovers An auncient booke, hight Briton moniments, he nds that book in Eumnestes room, the room of memory, ruinous and old, its primary occupant all decrepit in his feeble corse and yet with liuely vigour . . . in his mind:
This man of innite remembrance was, And things foregone through many ages held, Which he recorded still, as they did pas, Ne suffred them to perish through long eld, As all things else, the which this world doth weld, But laid them vp in his immortall scrine.52

Despite the assertion of a perfect act of recording without loss, a perfect treasuring up of the past in this immortall scrine, the passage is suffused with the awareness of historical loss, of change, of passing time, of the death of all things. Signicantly, the passage takes place
51. On the word monument, see James Kearney, Enshrining Idolatry in The Faerie Queene, English Literary Renaissance 32.1 (2002), 5. 52. The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London, 1977), II.ix.59, 55, 56.
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within Spensers extended allegory of the body: the problem of the materiality of the text is also the problem of human embodiment, of mortality, sickness, weakness, passion. This awareness of physical vulnerability extends from Eumnestes decrepit body to the equally decayed bodies of the records he treasures:
His chamber all was hangd about with rolles, And old records from auncient times deriud, Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolles, That were all worme-eaten, and full of canker holes. (II.ix.57)

Such moniments, it is clear, are thoroughly vulnerable to the fate of all other things, to the erosions and depredations of time, to the threat of physical destruction and loss. If the monument promises to preserve the past for memoryif it offers itself, in effect, as a kind of tomb marking and celebrating past historythere is yet no guarantee of its own survival, no guarantee of its successful transmission into the future. Like Guyon, Foxe can claim to have rescued the acts of the past for historical memory. He has not merely entered Eumnestes room, he has done Eumnestes work, searching for and collecting these rolles and old records in order to preserve them in his scrinea word that, in its meaning as reliquary, a treasure chest for sacred fragments, evokes a connection to both the divine and to death, to the tomb, to the fragment miraculously rescued from mortality and physical dissolution.53 The monument is also a memorial or a relic.At the end of the letter to the reader prefacing the 1570 edition, Foxe refers to the admiration, and almost superstition with which not onely the memory, but also the reliques of the earliest martyrs were receiued and kept amongest the auncient Christians. Despite that phrase almost superstition with its remarkably muted anxiety about the veneration of relics, we are clearly being invited to compare the work of collecting monuments with this treasuring up of the physical remains of martyred bodies. Almost a page of text passes before Foxe remembers to insist on the difference between his saints and Catholic ones.54 Unlike either Guyon or Eumnestes, Foxe can also claim to have salvaged these memorials for a wide readership, thereby enabling count53. OED, scrine; note particularly the citation from 1648, a Skrine, or a Cofn. 54. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. *3v: though we repute not their ashes, chaynes, and swerdes in the stede of reliques: yet let vs yelde thus much vnto theyr commemoration, to glorify the Lord in his Saintes, and imitate their death (as much as we may) with like constancy, or theyr lyues at the least with like innocency.
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less further scenes of reception, interpretation, and instruction. But the book tells less than the truth when it promises both Actes and Monumentes, because we as readers can only access those acts as Monumentesthat is, as documents, chronicles, court records, everything that Foxe and his collaborators have sifted for evidence of the semi-visible, semi-occulted church of the persecuted martyrs.The acts, as acts, are lost. What is visible to the reader, what remains, is only the book and the monuments it transmits, the documents Foxe promises to exhibite.55 What this means is that, unlike Guyon, we as readers cannot ourselves enter the historical archive, cannot open Eumnestes scrine, cannot come into direct contact with the relics of the past, but will receive those relics only in the form transmitted to us by the printed page.The archive comes into being only in the pages of the book. In this further sense, then, the book really offers neither acts nor monuments, but printed redactions and imitations, the forme or tenor of documents that are themselves necessarily absent.The history of martyrdom, of witnessing, is present here only in facsimile, as testimonies of testimonies of testimonies. If the book offers us the acts of the faithful martyrs, its title cannot disguise the fact that it can give us those acts only at third-hand.The book centers on the scene of witnessing, on martyrdom as a making-present of the faith, and it labors to make the documents of that scene visibly present in its pages; and yet the more we think about it, the more the question of witnessing opens recursively, obtruding layers of distance and mediation between the reader and the scene of faith.

iv
One of the fundamental paradoxes of reading Actes and Monumentes, as Ryan Netzley has argued, is that it produces endless evidence for its claims about church history while also insisting that no amount of evidentiary verication can convince the reader who has not already accepted the truth of its narrative.56 The document seems to be the
55. See Breitenberg, The Flesh Made Word, 396: By a variety of narrative strategies, Foxe seeks to collapse the inevitable mediation between the event and its textual depiction; Foxe wants to reproduce the original event. 56. As Netzley writes in The End of Reading, The Acts and Monuments seeks to include all evidence of Protestant and proto-Protestant martyrdom, but simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility and irrelevance of such a goal (204). Thomas Freeman has expressed skepticism
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evidentiary foundation of this narrative, but it is a very problematic kind of foundation: literally absent from the page of the printed book; threatened by loss or its own unintelligibility; and perhaps worst of all, unable clearly to speak its own truth. For centuries the Catholic church had maintained control over the institutional means for writing and recording history. In large measure it had both created and controlled the archive. To read the records preserved in that archive requires the modern reader who would access them in their truth to engage in a genuine reading against the grain: albeit the wordes of the statute there, as Foxe writes in the case of a document from the reign of Henry IV, through corruption of that time call certain individuals false and peruerse preachers,yet notwithstanding whosoeuer readeth historyes and conferreth the order and descent of times, shall vnderstand these to be no false teachers, but faithfull witnesses of the truth.57 Of the charge of treason against Lord Cobham, Foxe acknowledges that to the simple reader its words may seem difcult or troubling, yet insists that he does not fear to produce those words out of the recordes . . . as they stand, because the true harted reader will perceive here the crafty handling of the aduersaries.58 A reading that takes into account the order and descent of times promises to rescue truth in the face of deceit by inverting the terms of its text, substituting faithful for faithless, martyr for heretic, loyal subject for traitor. Foxe therefore insists on the difference between simple and true harted readers, the former taking the words as they nd them, and the latter understanding the more difcult hermeneutic operation required before the real sense of the document can be made plain. A kind of theology of election governs this hermeneutics, so that only those who already believe can in fact interpret properly. It is not the document that supports the largest claims of the narrative, but rather the total narrative that supports and authorizes the reading of any particular document.The document is interpreted so as to bring it into line with an already-totalized understanding of history, in a procedure that necessarily feels itself free to emend those aspects of the text that stray

about this reading, noting that the prefatory material of Foxes book seems to suggest, to the contrary, the efcacy of historical documentation and argument in convincing its readers (personal communication). 57. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. [p]4. 58. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. Nn6.
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from the point it should be making. For Foxe, such emendation is licensed by a rhetoric according to which Catholicism itself is something forged and corrupted, a false copy of the true church that has in turn engaged in rampant textual forgery and misprision: except it be the bookes onely of the newe Testament, & of the old, what is almost in the popes church, but either it is mingled or depraued, or altered, or corrupted, eyther by some additions interlased, or by some diminution mangled and gelded, or by some glose adulterate, or with manifest lyes contiminate.59 Given this sense of the textual condition of his manuscript materials, it is surely no surprise that we can at times catch Foxe or his collaborators tendentiously editing their sourcesor as they might put it, repairing the damage done by centuries of Catholic corruption. Here, Foxes notion of veracity collides with our own: where for modern historians, documentary truth consists in the faithful reproduction of an original textual object, in the Actes and Monumentes delity is a matter of harmonizing the claims of the document with the claims of a providential narrative that necessarily take precedence.60 The evidentiary status of this narrative recedes, just as the scene of witnessing itself recedes, behind layers of mediation that complicate or even belie the promise to make present the scene of martyrdom, to offer a true witnessing. Seen from this perspective, there seems to be something peculiarly contradictory, even compulsive, about the decision to produce such an enormous book, such a vast collection of evidence, as if we are dealing here with an effort to ll by sheer reiteration, even sheer physical mass, a space that cannot be lled.61 The very size of the book seems like an effort to make visible the ghostly true church, to
59. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. Oo6. 60. See, e.g., Collinson, Truth and Legend, which argues that Foxes distortions are accomplished through the presentation and interpretation of evidence (p. 35) and through omission and deliberate exclusion (p. 36); he shapes the material to hand, but does not freely invent. See also Thomas Freeman, Texts, Lies, and Microlm: Reading and Misreading Foxes Book of Martyrs, Sixteenth Century Journal 30.1 (1999), 40. 61. According to Kastan, Little Foxes, William Turner pleaded with Foxe to reduce the size, and therefore the cost, of the 1563 edition so that ordinary readers could afford it.Turners target price was ten shillings (p. 120). Foxe did the opposite. Peter Blayney calculates that the 1570 edition would have retailed for between twenty-four and thirty shillings, up to three times the price Turner names. See John Day and the Bookshop That Never Was, in Material London, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Philadelphia, 2000), p. 331; also Julian Roberts, Bibliographical Aspects of John Foxe, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. Loades, p. 48; Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book; and Kastan,Size Matters, p. 149.The book was so large that it seems John Day underestimated the amount of paper it required by as much as 10%, forcing him to use
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bring it into the light in full, physical being; and yet Foxes hermeneutic seems to acknowledge the impossibility of any such effort. While clearly aimed at the particular problems of this project, this hermeneutic also draws on the paradoxes of a Protestant scripturalism. Far from simply encouraging the faithful to cultivate an intimate relationship with the text, sola scriptura opens up real philosophical problems centering on the act of reading and on the status of the text. In Protestant theology Scripture is the only true source of a contact with the divine that has been withdrawn from the Catholic tradition, from the institution of the church, and from physical practices like telling beads, going on pilgrimage, and offering prayers for the dead. Take away the word, Calvin writes, and no faith will remain.62 Scripture is also, according to the claims regularly made for it, perfectly self-authenticating and perfectly self-explicating. In Luthers words, it is most certain, most easy to understand, most clear, its own interpreter, testing, judging and illuminating everything by everything.63 In a certain sense Scripture does not need to be read at all in the Protestant imagination, insofar as its meaning is supposed to be perfectly clear, perfectly lucid, and perfectly available to anyone who would receive it with an open heart, without any labor of interpretation, translation, or decoding. If we look at it with clear eyes, Calvin writes in the Institutes, it will forthwith present itself with a divine majesty which will subdue our presumptuous opposition; contemplating Scripture, we feel perfectly assuredas much so as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on itthat it came to us, by the instrumentality of men, from the very mouth of God.64 But the sacred texts by no means guarantee that such assurance will be experienced by the reader. Faithful reading, as one recent survey of early modern scriptural hermeneutics puts it, can only happen in the economy of grace.65 The word is . . . like the sun which shines upon
sheets normally discarded as waste or to manufacture new sheets by pasting smaller pieces of writing paper together. See P.S. Dunkin, Foxes Actes and Monumentes (1570) and single page imposition, The Library, 5th series, 2 (1947), 15970. 62. Institutes, III.ii.6; unless otherwise noted, all Calvin quotations are taken from Institutes of Christian Religion, tr. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh, 184546). 63. In Mickey L. Mattox, Martin Luther, in Christian Theologies of Scripture, ed. Holcomb, p. 105. 64. Institutes, I.vii.4, I.vii.5. 65. Harton, Theologies of Scripture in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in Holcomb, ed., p. 88.
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us all, Calvin writes, but is of no use to the blind; without the illumination of the Spirit the word has no effect.66 Calvin makes it quite clear that faith is not grounded on Scripture, if by that we mean that the reading of Scripture provides us with a kind of evidence for our faith. On the contrary, faith both precedes reading,purifying the mind so as to give it a relish for divine truth, and follows it as its consequence, as the knowledge and certainty of the divine will in regard to us.67 Much of the work of the second and third books of the Institutes consists in elaborating this seemingly vicious circle, distinguishing a reading both produced by and producing faith from any other kind of reading. Calvin separates a genuinely faithful reading even from a reading of the Bible that assents to every word of the text; that is, he distinguishes between a belief in the Bible that results from reading it, and is thus only the shadow or image of faith, from a reading that pledges itself to the book in advance: Multitudes undoubtedly believe . . . Scripture, in the same way in which they believe in the records of past events, or events which they have actually witnessed.There are some who go even further: they regard the word of God as an infallible oracle. . . . To such the testimony of faith is attributed, but by catachresis.68 Everything is geared toward establishing the absolute difference of the Bible from anything we could call evidence or proof, even anything like a text, if by this we mean something that requires interpretation.This is perhaps what is illustrated in the frontispiece of the Actes and Monumentes in that image of the tetragrammaton blazing forth in full glory: not an act of reading but a reception of the divine spirit that conditions any true reading, and is thus the truth of reading. It is Scripture as a sun shining only for those who can see. Signicantly, the antithesis of such reading is, for Calvin, the reading of a historical narrative: true reading is radically anti-historical, non-evidentiary, something totally unlike the examination of a witness.
66. Institutes, III.ii.34, III.ii.33. Catholic theologians would assent to this latter point, but would argue that this Spirit was now institutionally present only in the Catholic church; see J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge, Eng., 2001), p. 23 and fns. 70, 71. 67. Institutes, III.ii.33, III.ii.6. As Randall Zachman writes, when Calvin insists that Scripture is self-authenticating (autopiston), . . . he does not mean that the Bible itself conveys its own authority to the pious, but that its divine origin has been disclosed to them by the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit, in Holcomb, ed., p. 117 68. Institutes, III.ii.10, III.ii.9. John Allen renders the last phrase, by a catachresis, a tropical or improper form of expression, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. John Allen (Grand Rapids, 1949), I, 607.
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In this model of reading the book disappears. When we look at the book, we see the the divine image visibly impressed on it. In Henry Beveridges translation this dream of a perfect seeing expresses itself by way of a metaphoric displacement of print: we see not the inked traces of pieces of moveable type, but God himself impressed on the pages of the book.Thomas Nortons sixteenth-century translation stays closer to the Latin when it renders this phrase,as if we beheld the maiesty of God himselfe there present, but even here it is a matter of seeing not a book but the majesty of God, Dei numen.69 Metaphorically, the book becomes a kind of icon, a visual representation of precisely the kind that Calvinist iconoclasm attacked so vigorously as an actual practice. The theologian who will a few pages later dismiss as a catachresis a faith that follows the text rather than assenting to it absolutely and in advance nevertheless relies on a whole series of gurative displacements in order to imagine what faithful reading is really like.At the same time, Calvins slight acknowledgment of the instrumentality of men intrudes the faintest recognition of the inevitable mediation of the reading experience, a recognition that the book that carries the word of God is a thing made by human beings. The encounter with Scripture seeks to be the one perfectly unmediated experience of the divine in Calvinist thought, and as such places a tremendous, perhaps unsupportable epistemological burden on the act of reading, and above all on the physical incarnation of the text, its material being as an object that is vulnerable to textual corruption, mistranslation, loss, and destruction.The physical book, the printed word of God, marks the inevitable mediation of the divine word and its embodiment as a humanly-constructed object. In this sense the book is a screen between the faithful reader and the reception of Gods word; in response to that problem of mediation, Protestant scriptural hermeneutics leaps beyond the book to the inward prompting of the spirit and to the text as a sun or an image of God.

v
One problem with the standard narrative about the relationship between print and Protestantism, then, is that Protestant scriptural hermeneutics
69. The Institvtion of Christian Religion, tr. Thomas Norton (1578), sig. C2v; Institvtio Christian religionis (1576), sig. B3. Allen renders the key phrase, an intuitive perception of God himself in it, Institutes, tr. Allen, I, 9091.
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are themselves too paradoxical to support any easy celebration of the new technology.Another is that it ignores the complexities of print as a medium of textual production. It depends on our capacity to imagine print as establishing a certain epistemological xity, a certain reliability and regularity of the texta narrative that Adrian Johns has pointedly critiqued. If, as Foxe writes, the lyght of printyng has given the whole world eyes to seeanother gure strikingly distant from any real scene of readingit also threatens to obtrude error, misreading, tendentious or even simply careless misappropriation, a fragmentation of the text into the endlessly competing bibles of the early modern print market: the Coverdale Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Rheims Bible, the Authorized Version, and so on, with all the various defenses, glosses, corrections, and repudiations that the spread of Gods word in the vernacular actually entailed.70 This messy textual universe becomes still more complex once we factor in the activities not only of translators and publishers but also of readers, as Peter Stallybrass has emphasized:if we talk about the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Authorized Bible as separate translations, there are in fact elements that migrate from one translation to another or that are in some editions of a specic translation but not in another. Moreover, readers could add, and less often subtract, all kinds of materials beside what we might like to think of as the bible proper when they had their composite bibles bound and rebound. Bibles were, indeed, usually composites.71 Early modern readers were not only interpreting their bibles idiosyncratically, they were also assembling idiosyncratic and variable objects, so that what passed as the Bible could be quite different from case to case. If the early modern period produced The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Stephen Greenblatts felicitous phrase, it also produced a word of God divided against itself, not word but words, endless, proliferating, polemically charged words.72 No wonder Foxe preferred to imagine the press as light or a voice, forgetting the messier realities of the print shop and, beyond it, the
70. Actes and Monumentes (1570), sig. DD5. 71. Stallybrass, Books and Scrolls, p. 51. 72. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 74. See also Kastan, The noyse of the new Bible, and Jane O. Newman,The Word Made Print: Luthers 1522 New Testament in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Representations 11 (1985), 95134.
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marketplace for books, in which readers could make and remake the text according to their own interests and desires, their own secrete iudgements. The Actes and Monumentes, of course, is an historical narrative, and thus exactly the kind of work that Calvin used to exemplify the dynamics of non-scriptural reading. And yet its hermeneutics at times parallels the central paradox of Protestant scripturalism, which at once places the book at the center of a psychological drama of faith and also simultaneously withdraws it, retracts it, and makes it accessible only to a faith given in advance. In a similar way the Actes and Monumentes offers countless scenes of witnessing, a massive accumulation of historical and textual evidence, and yet also tells us that we will be convinced by this evidence only if we have already committed ourselves to it, only if we have true disposed mindes. It tells us that we can only read the documents that record these scenes of witnessing if we already know what they have to say. The Actes and Monumentes embeds a hermeneutic that enables it to insist on the central importance of the manuscript document, and even on the documents fragile, physical form, its vulnerability to corruption, while also imagining that we can look through this fragile physicality, that we can reverse or undo the damage of time, that we can evade the problems of transmission and come into direct contact with a divine truth only partly testied to in the document as we have it. Beyond Calvins juxtaposition of historical and scriptural reading the Actes and Monumentes discovers a dynamic of faith that underwrites the interpretation of historical and textual evidence, securing the true place of the archive: not, nally, the brittle or damaged manuscript page, nor yet the printed page that seeks to salvage the document, but the mind of the reader. The Actes and Monumentes thus manifests a complicated relationship to the medium of its own realization. It motivates a set of typographical codes that seek to make the printed page transparent to the documents it encodes; an archival rhetoric that equivocates about the kinds of translation through which those documents have become print; and a hermeneutics of reading that nally bypasses the question of documentary evidence altogether in order to assert that the proper interpretation of all of these monuments depends on a faith that both underwrites the true knowledge of history and enables the often radical rewriting of the documents themselves. In all of this, the book manifests a relationship to its medium that reects both the particular difculties of this archival project and a typically Protestant hermeneutics of
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reading, in which the material book and above all the printed book occupies a paradoxical, perhaps contradictory position within the economy of faith. stony brook university

2011 English Literary Renaissance Inc.