Archive.org direct link (Vol 1)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 2)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 3)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 4)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 5)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 6)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 7)
Archive.org direct link (Vol 8)
Open Library main page
Online variorium edition
This is one of those books, like Froissart's Chronicles or The Augustan History, that's rarely encountered in its full state so I'm posting an 1836-9 edition that appears to be basically a complete reprint. (More on that below.) This rarity of the full text is understandable since it's both an enormous work and one with a structure that allows easy excerpting. The current edition from Oxford World's Classics, for instance, contains mostly British martyrs. But there are numerous other editions over the centuries that reduce the size for one purpose or another, simplify the language, change the text and sometimes update it. An edition on Gutenberg.org includes an account of martyrs during the French Revolution.
John Foxe (1516-1587) was an academic who become a Protestant and then was caught up in the religious controversies of the period. When Mary I gained the throne Foxe moved to Frankfurt and Basel before returning during Elizabeth I's reign. His Actes and Monuments was written over a period of years as an attempt to chronicle Christian martyrs. It was hugely popular, at least partly because it tied into or was at least used for anti-Catholic sentiment. And also popular of course because of the sometimes lurid subject matter. I'm sure there's much more to this but I've only read a few bits of the book and not much actually about it. However my library has copies of Elizabeth Evenden & Thomas S. Freeman's Religion and the Book in Early Modern England : The Making of Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" (2011) and John N. King's Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (2006) so those sound much more up my alley.
So about the edition above. It's also not exactly a true reprint since it reprints the original fourth edition (the last during Foxe's lifetime) but adds material from the previous editions. Latin text has been shifted to notes. The one thing that's not quite clear to me is that there's mention of a supplement that is either not scanned or is actually the Vol 1 linked above (which carried an 1841 date). The preface mentioning that also discusses some revisions that sound like they could be editorial changes to correct Foxe's errors but is not as clear about that as I would like.
