Not only Catholic historians. According to
this article by Patrick Collinson, it was the common opinion in the 19th and early 20th centuries that Foxe was not to be trusted. My advisor, David Steinmetz, is a Methodist, and he said in his short biography of John Hooper (in
Reformers in the Wings) that Fox is always to be taken with a grain of salt (though that’s a fairly moderate statement, of course). Collinson, however, argues that Foxe was in fact the greatest historian of the sixteenth century! He apparently has an article that goes into the question of Foxe’s veracity in more detail (see footnote 39 in the article to which I’ve linked). I’m not deeply familiar with the scholarly debate on Foxe, but I have received the general impression that he’s been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years. Partly I think this is due to the postmodern awareness of how biased *all *scholarship is. An author with an obvious and blatant bias, like Foxe, no longer seems to be doing something radically different from history.
So I wouldn’t agree that Foxe has been totally “debunked,” but I certainly wouldn’t rely on him uncritically (or on any other source!). In short, as usual, my mentor Prof. Steinmetz is right!
Edwin
He is not to be trusted with regard to the veracity of many his statements. I know that with regard to the Inquisition, for example, he was completely off base as he had used a source (by some author assuming a false persona, Montanus) that was fictionalized.
Here’s a snippet of an article I read:
“Foxe based his accounts of the martyrs partly on authentic documents and reports of the trials, and on statements received direct from the friends of the sufferers, but he was too hasty a worker and too violent a partisan to produce anything like a correct or impartial account of the mass of facts with which he had to deal. Anthony à Wood says that Foxe “believed and reported all that was told him, and there is every reason to suppose that he was purposely misled, and continually deceived by those whose interest it was to bring discredit on his work”, but he admits that the book is a monument of his industry, his laborious research and his sincere piety. The gross blunders due to carelessness have often been exposed, and there is no doubt that Foxe was only too ready to believe evil of the Catholics, and he cannot always be exonerated from the charge of wilful falsification of evidence.”
nndb.com/people/551/000094269/
Then there is this (the first and last paragraph were taken out of Foxes book):
“The Irish, who formerly led an unsettled and roving life, in the woods, bogs, and mountains, and lived on the depredation of their neighbors, they who, in the morning seized the prey, and at night divided the spoil, have, for many years past, become quiet and civilized. They taste the sweets of English society, and the advantages of civil government. They trade in our cities, and are employed in our manufactories. They are received also into English families; and treated with great humanity by the Protestants.” (9)
“It is only with great difficulty that one can believe that the reviser of Fox’s work would insert such a blatantly false statement, but so it is.”
“One wonders where to begin in the exposition of this particular citation? A good place to start would probably be at the beginning. What was it that reduced the Irish to the state of utter poverty mentioned by the reviser? The answer is to be found in the infamous Irish Persecution Laws.”
“These infamous laws were imposed by England (a protestant nation) upon a nation that was, at the time, 97% Catholic. To quote a protestant historian on the conditions in Ireland after the laws were imposed:”
“They ( i.e. Catholics ) are not only excluded from all offices in church and state, but are interdicted from the army and the law, in all its branches. . . . Every barrister, clerk, attorney, or solicitor is obliged to take a solemn oath not to employ persons of that persuasion; no not as hackney clerks, at the miserable salary of seven shillings a week. No tradesman of that persuasion is capable of exercising his trade freely in any town corporate: so that they trade and work in their own trade native towns as aliens, paying, as such, quarter age, and other charges and impositions. . . .” (10)
geocities.com/militantis/actsandmonuments.html