`writers to solemnise and celebrate… Actes and memory': Foxe and the Business of Textual Memory

Author: Hiscock, Andrew

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2008 , pp. 68-85(18)

Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract:

One of the pervasive thematic interests throughout Foxe's narratives of captivity and torture is how human heroism can be memorialized adequately for succeeding generations who profess the reformist faith. In some prefatory remarks to the Pandectae locorum communium Foxe enquired: `what can poets, what can historians, what can rhetoricians, and orators […] provide by their art without memory […]?'. This chapter explores a number of accounts of martyrdom across the chronological span of The Actes and Monuments. It combines detailed analysis with a more general appreciation of early modern ideas on the implications of remembering. Particular attention is devoted to the narrative strategies Foxe deploys in his accounts of captivity, torture, and execution down the ages and how these might be seen to engage with prevailing sixteenth-century cultural discourses regarding the status and function of memory and the writing of history.

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of Wales, Bangor

Publication date: 2008-07-01

More about this publication?

A supplement to the Modern Language Review, this journal includes articles and reviews on the language and literature of the English-speaking world. Most of the volumes published so far are 'Special Numbers', collections of between fifteen and eighteen commissioned articles on particular topics, such as the impact of the French Revolution on English writers; literature in the modern media; and colonial and imperial themes in literature.