Spiritual Foxe, John: Book of Martyrs; v1; 21 Jul 2008

[TedPark]

After the Bible, itself, Foxe's Book of Martyrs was the most important work influencing the ideology and psychology of the Reformation, in general, and the Protestant movement, in particular. This is partly due to the fact that for the entire 1st generation of Protestants the Bible and the Book of Martyrs were essentially the only printed spiritual materials available to the masses. In fact, there were only tracts and small works above and beyond this for several generations!

It was also partly due to the design of the book. At the time it was the largest and most complex work yet printed in England. For the literate there was a collection of inspiring and passionate stories. For the illiterate there was a wealth of woodcut illustrations. And, not the least, the author presented all of this material, not so much as gruesome defeats and failures of the body, but as shining triumphs of the spirit. In fact, two of the several official titles of the work are:

Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable

Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, with a General discourse of these latter Persecutions, horrible troubles and tumults, stirred up by Romish Prelates in the Church, with diverse other things incident, especially to this Realm of England and Scotland, as partly also to all other foreign nations.

To my knowledge, there is no good version of this work for the eBook community. This is another collaborative effort in which I have started with text from a particular website, and then rebuilt this into a well-structured and uniformly-formatted eBook.

For this eBook, in recognition of its heritage, I have also included a half-dozen representative woodcut illustrations.

For a definitive and more scholarly look at the early editions (in the old English wording, spelling, and punctuation) please direct your attention to this authoritative website: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe/.

As usual, I am providing the tested LRF version and the complete HTML to facilitate conversion to other formats. This is very tight HTML code that has passed the W3C validator. Although designed with the Sony Reader in-mind, there are few, if any, aspects to these books that would prevent them being adequately converted to other formats.

Statistics for this eBook include:

~ 150,000 words
~ 2,000 paragraphs
~ 300 pages as a Word document or as web pages.
~ 500 pages on the Sony Reader

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[Roy White]

Wow terrific upload thanks.!!