Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition

John Foxe (1517-87) was one of the most influential writers of the English Reformation. In the forty years between 1547 and his death, he produced some forty works in English and Latin. However, both in his lifetime and since then, he has been principally known for only one of them, The Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs. <br> John Foxe fled to the Continent during the reign of Mary I, and on his return, wrote a history of the English Protestant martyrs from the 14th century to his own time. Usually known as The Book of Martyrs, it traces the triumph of Protestantism through the sufferings of English Protestants. <br> Some four hundred copies of Foxes editions of 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583 remain, but most are defective to some extent, and all bear their original imperfections. Although microfilms of all the four original editions were available, and were adequate for general use, they too had their imperfections. The copies selected for filming were damaged and incomplete and many running heads and marginalia were omitted during photography. Moreover, these images were devoid of any commentary or apparatus, and well over a hundred years of Reformation scholarship had elapsed since Pratt completed his work. <br> Also a number of bowdlerised and abbreviated editions had been published in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, and although there was little danger of these deceiving serious scholars, the proposal suggested that the time was ripe for the full text to reappear with a modern commentary.<br> It had also been recognised for some time that the Acts and Monuments is a major work of sixteenth century scholarship and a significant influence upon the development of the national identity. A reliable scholarly edition was urgently required. <br> In 1993 the British Academy established this project to produce a new edition. Originally, a paper copy was envisaged, however the scale of the project soon became too large to make this feasible. The 1583 edition alone is densely packed with information, including reference to hundreds of sources, some of them imperfectly identified. In scale it runs to nearly three million words. The Committee decided to switch its objective from a print edition to CD-ROM, which in turn would make a variorum edition feasible, embracing all the four original texts.<br> Due to technical developments and innovations in 2002, the committee, with the approval of the British Academy, decided to transfer the publishing medium from CD-ROM to an online edition.<br>