John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (commonly known as the Book of Martyrs) is a bibliographer's dream. Published in multiple editions both during Foxe's lifetime and after, this work stands as a perfect test case for how books during the hand-press era were designed, produced, and disseminated. In Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture, John King thus endeavors to write “the history of a book that epitomizes the history of the book in early modern England” (1). King models his study on Robert Darnton's “communications circuit,” which shows the interlinking interests of the author, publisher, shipper, bookseller, and reader as part of a complex network.

The first of four substantial chapters examines the nature of the Book of Martyrs, including its medieval and early modern analogues. King rightly points out that Foxe was not an autonomous author, but rather an “author-compiler” who worked with his publisher and many others to stitch together primary documents such as prisoners' narratives of their examinations and eyewitness accounts of executions. The fact that Foxe and his associates drew on both printed sources and primary documents shows “the continuation of manuscript circulation and scribal publication after the advent of printing” (45). As an author-compiler, Foxe also contributed to the paratext; elements such as addresses to the reader, marginal notes, place indicators, and glosses guided the readers to sources, taught them how to distinguish these martyr stories from Roman Catholic saints' lives, and helped them to determine the veracity of certain documents.

In the second chapter, King tells the long and complex publication history of the Acts and Monuments, from Foxe's initial Latin prototypes published on the continent to four massive versions published in England during Foxe's lifetime (these four main editions of the Acts and Monuments can now be viewed in an online variorum edition: www.hrionline.ac.uk/johnfoxe) to a further five editions and several abridgements published during the next century. By comparing these redactions, King's study “places particular emphasis upon how the shifting material forms of these books affected the understanding of generations of readers” (92). For example, the prefatory material of the 1563 edition shows a great optimism for Elizabethan Protestantism, which is then tempered by the larger 1570 edition that expresses some signs of discontent with the Elizabethan settlement. Other more practical concerns influenced the book's production too, such as the high price, which was once addressed by using cheaper paper or by those such as Timothy Bright who produced abridgements. It becomes clear that the length, format, size, and typeface all contributed to the sociopolitical story of each edition.

One of the most important facets of this chapter is the discussion of Foxe's printer, John Day, who exemplifies the complex role of a printer-publisher in the sixteenth century. Day funded the publication and made key decisions about the layout, such as using an unprecedented mixture of different typefaces, languages, and tables in order to appeal to different kinds of readers, from the highly educated (literati) to the uneducated (illiterati). This chapter provides an indispensable aid to anyone who is interested in the evolution of the Book of Martyrs in relation to early modern printing practices, while also underlining the fact that this book was not a fixed entity (as some have claimed for books after the advent of the printing press), but rather an evolving work that changed significantly from one version to the next.

The feature of the Book of Martyrs that seems to have attracted the most attention from the moment it was first published is the numerous woodcuts. As King notes, these illustrations (jointly planned by Day and Foxe) provide evidence that Protestant iconoclasm did not necessitate iconophobia. The famous depictions of burning martyrs, often including banderoles filled with their last words, helped make this book so popular. While much has been written about these illustrations in recent years, King helpfully categorizes the different types of images and explores many of them from a fresh perspective, such as the controversial calendar of martyr-saints and the elaborate fold-out woodcut titled the “table of X persecutions.” Moving from the intentions of the compiler and publisher, King looks at the early modern readers and viewers of these woodcuts, who sometimes filled in the empty banderoles with words or colored in the illustrations; such details provide fascinating evidence for how these images affected their audience.

The final chapter focuses more specifically on readers of Foxe's book and what we can learn from their reactions, which were anything but monolithic. King once again draws a sharp line between the literati and illiterati—a distinction that is perhaps overemphasized throughout his work. Nonetheless, King's command of the anecdotal material in this section, as throughout the book, inspires a complex picture of the history of early modern reading. For example, we learn about readers of Foxe's book from Archbishop Laud to John Bunyan, about the provenance of various copies, about how some copies were worn out from too much reading, about the explorers who carried the Book of Martyrs to the New World, and about the tendency of subsequent generations to add their own events (such as the Gunpowder Plot) to Foxe's master narrative.

Like the Book of Martyrs itself, King's book provides much in the way of paratext that is an aid to the readers, such as numerous images (51), organized subheadings, clear summaries at the end of each chapter, and a glossary of printing terms of the hand-press era. By approaching this subject from the perspective of Darnton's “communications circuit,” King supports the assertion that “books result from the collective impact of human activity on the material elements that went into production” (320). Thus, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture is indeed an impressive book history that substantially improves our understanding of this work in particular, as well as of early modern printing in general.