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8 Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as pocket devotional: Clement Cotton’s Mirror of Martyrs (1613), a seventeenth-century bestseller
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Published:October 2024
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Abstract
John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church, first published in 1563, was not only the largest publishing project of its time, but also one of the most successful: nine complete editions were published by the end of the seventeenth century. This sustained commercial and cultural success is even more remarkable when one considers the book’s considerable cost: the retail price of the 1596 edition was 24s, an amount roughly equal to three months’ wages of a skilled London clothworker. Not surprisingly, the Acts and Monuments’ great length, enormous popularity, and forbidding cost together conduced to create a lively market for abridgments, far and away the most successful of which was Clement Cotton’s Mirror of Martyrs (1613), an epitome comprising noteworthy dying speeches, sermons, prayers, meditations, and letters of the martyrs. Printed eight times over c.70 years (1613–85), the Mirror was not a static object, but an evolving work. This essay examines the successive editions of Cotton’s Mirror – tracing changes in content, typography, illustration, and mise-en-page – while also considering antecedents, contemporary competitors, and descendent works to understand how abridgments made available to a wider readership a germ of Foxe’s seminal work.
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