John Foxe

John Foxe (c. 1517–1587) was an English clergyman and martyrologist. A fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, he resigned over his Protestant convictions, and on the accession of Mary Tudor he fled to the Continent, working as a printer's corrector in Strasbourg and Basel while he gathered accounts of the persecutions. The result, Actes and Monuments, known as the Book of Martyrs, appeared in 1563 and grew through later editions into one of the largest books of the age, chained beside the Bible in churches. Foxe returned under Elizabeth, refused high office, and spent his last years in London revising the work and pleading against the burning of heretics.