Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Tremendous and tragic. Foxe's temperament and work on this book gave him a personal distaste for religious violence that does him credit. To be sure, he presents the Anglican side, and the Roman Catholic church bears the brunt of his opprobrium. Some incredible stories; easy to forget that only two hundred years ago, Christians were burning each other to death for religious disagreements. It is horrible to realize how much persecution of Christians is done by Christians. But we must remember that our own blind spot is to treat the things of God too lightly. We need to land somewhere between making martyrs and the cruelty of heresy.

O livro dos mártires é um clássico da literatura mundial. O livro reconta a vida, o sofrimento e a morte triunfante dos mártires cristãos da História. Iniciando-se com a história do primeiro mártir - o próprio Jesus Cristo - este relato excepcional traça as raízes da perseguição religiosa. Expõe os casos de mártires famosos como John Wycliffe, John Huss, William Tyndale, Martinho Lutero, Thomas Cranmer e muitos outros. Infelizmente, o tema do martírio religioso recusa-se a ser relegado aos arquivos da História. Cristãos em diversos países hoje vivem e defendem a sua fé sob a ameaça de morte. Muitos acabam pagando o preço máximo. E cada uma dessas mortes suscita uma interrogação na consciência de todo cristão: show more o que eu faria no seu lugar? A reflexão inspirada pela morte dos mártires pode nos levar ao cerne da nossa fé. Esta nova edição conta com a tradução primorosa de Almiro Pisetta e litogravuras originais de Marcelo Moscheta. John Foxe (1516-1587), autor do livro, nasceu na Inglaterra e estudou na Universidade de Oxford. Durante a perseguição dos protestantes pela rainha Mary Tudor, exilou-se na Alemanha e na Suíça, onde escreveu a primeira edição desta obra. A mensagem de O Livro dos Mártires moldou a consciência religiosa e política da Inglaterra durante vários séculos. show less

October 2024 I started reading this a little while ago and finished it the other day. I am glad to have read it as it is a real classic. The edition I used is in a series of Chritian classics by Hendrickson. The one prolem is that this is an abridgement and I seem unable to find an authentic unabridged version anywhere online. What I have read is as gruesome as people say it is. At one point it seemed as though the persecutors were trying to find evermore crue ways to kill people. One admires the martyrs, although on occassion one wonders if more could have been done to preserve life. What an issue persecution is. Strangely its existence appears to back up the truth claims of Christianity,

My husband and I read this over a period of several years, and firmly believe that every Christian should read it. We were simultaneously horrified and edified as we read account after account of men and women who stood firm in their faith. Hundreds of people were burned at the stake and/or tortured because they held the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, and did not honor man's opinions or positions. This book should serve as a wake-up call to an increasingly compromising and evil generation. Excellent book!

It took me over a year to finish reading this, a little bit at a time...you can only read about people being tortured and killed in every way imaginable (and some not imaginable) for so long at a time. Although it's probably good that this kind of thing got chronicled for history, it is some of the hardest reading I've ever done. Not just because people are getting tortured, maimed, and burned, but he tends to go into a lot of fairly mundane details...and after a few hundred pages, the emotional effect kind of gets lost as well. It starts to sound like you've heard all the stories before, only with different names. If you don't have my dysfunction of feeling unable to just read part of a book, you could read the first 50 pages or so and show more get pretty much the same effect as reading the whole book. show less

The illustrations are all from woodblocks and therefore not very good in quality, but they make up for that with their drama -- a veritable encyclopedia of every conceivable way for torturing and killing another human.

I've heard about this book for years, but never took an opportunity to read it. My impression? "Foxe's [some titles use “Fox's"] Book of Martyrs" is the Christian equivalent to Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace" in terms of tedious reading. "Martyrs" makes compelling examples of the evils of the pagans against early Christians, followed by similar examples of the evils propagated by the Inquisition of the Dark Ages.

I waded through about 20% of the narrative before I gave up in frustration over the overly-detailed narrative, the grammatical "noise" of the translation, instances of repetitiveness, and simple boredom. That is not to say that the subject matter is not important and educational; it's just that the presentation leaves a lot to show more be desired.

(Note: This book was the Kindle e-book version, which was not a selection option on librarything.) show less