Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments

Acts of Reading examines how John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments shaped reading and interpretive practice in the early modern period and addresses the impact of recent electronic editions of Foxe’s text on current reading practice and scholarship. The collection draws on history-of-the-book scholarship to make a plea for the centrality of Foxe to any discussion of Renaissance literary history. These essays also productively attend to the relationship between the materiality of books and the conceptual assumptions that govern our engagement with them. The anthology’s focus on digital editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs allows it to explore the often conflicted relationship between modern technologies of book production and reception and the early modern texts transmitted via these technologies. More broadly, Acts of Reading explores how books, and our encounters with them through different media, turn us into who we are.