Loades 1997

Loades, David, ed. John Foxe and the English Reformation. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997.

Shaping the Reader in the Acts and Monuments, by Susan Felch (52-65)

"Two narrative woodcuts relating to Edward VI's reign, one found first in the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments and the other added in 1570, both prominently feature women reading the Bible for themselves, but, significantly, they sit surrounded by the believing, and preaching, community." (53) -- why women??

"Yet, despite this confidence in the self-authenticating nature of true texts -- both scriptural and extra-scriptural -0- anxiety remained regarding the issue of interpretive coherence, an anxiety which is both registered and relieved in the prefaces, marginal notes, conclusions, indices, and other editorial material which constrict Reformation books. These encircling discourses had two important interlocking effects. First, they effectively encouraged a transactional hermeneutic in which meaning was understood to result from the encounter of a properly trained and responsive reader with a plain and simple text. Second, the editorial material helped to redefine the group fo elect believers as those who shared a strategy of reading and interpretation, rather than as those who shared a geograpic location, such as a parish church." (55)

preaces addressed to learned readers, the queen, and papist opponents -- "groups not usually identified with the simple ploughboy or ordinary layperson" (57), but those readers most likely to discount his work

A&M perhaps written at the urging of printer John Day; "despite Day's attempt to have Foxe write for the ordinary Englishman, however, all the preliminary material to the 1563 edition situates the first English edition as a responsible work of scholarship, intended to be read and evaluated by Foxe's own intellectual peers." (58)

next two editions oriented towards the layperson

"the wooden printing furniture contains the physical text -- those pieces of lead that imprint their form on to the damp paper -- so the editorial furniture contains the immaterial text as it makes its own imprint on to the receptive reader. Thus, although readers encounter the text in solitude [?], they are embraced in a communal hermeneutic circle which restrains private, eccentric interpretations." (64)

"In sum, the prefaces and other editorial material of Acts and Monuments provide a case study in the negotiation between a belief in self-authenticating texts and the need to establish interpretive coherence that led to the development of a transational hermeneutic in the sixteenth-century Protestant Church." (64)