Neither acts nor monuments

One of the most fundamental facts about John Foxe's Actes and Monuments is its internal heterogeneity: the book offers the history of Protestantism not as a continuous narrative but as an assemblage of documentsâ€" letters, depositions, statutes, papal bullsâ€"that, collectively, are presented as both the materials of a Protestant history and testimonies to the truth of that history. This article addresses the status of the reproduced document in Foxe in order to complicate our accounts of the book's relationship to its own medium, arguing that the real epistemological ground of the Actes and Monumentes lies in the manuscript archive it seeks to bring into being on the page by way of a flexible and varying typography. That effort involves it in a struggle against itself, an attemptâ€"in effectâ€"to efface the printed page as an unwanted intermediary between reader and manuscript. Recognizing a struggle between the book's archival impulse and the medium of its transmission allows us to see a more fraught relationship between Foxe and print, one that is structured into the book on its every page; it also opens up a more nuanced account of the relationship between Protestantism and print more generally.