Life & Wisdom Quote by John Foxe

The exclamation point is doing a lot of work: it turns a statistic into an accusation. Foxe isn’t calmly tallying casualties; he’s staging outrage. “Seventeen tribunals,” “long period,” “annually,” “on an average” reads like ledger-speak, the language of bureaucratic regularity. Then he detonates it with “burned” and “ten miserable beings!” The cold math is the point. Foxe wants you to feel how institutional cruelty hides behind routine, how murder becomes a scheduled civic function when it’s processed through courts and committees.

Context matters. Foxe, best known for Acts and Monuments (the “Book of Martyrs”), wrote in an England still raw from the Marian persecutions and newly invested in defining Protestant identity against Catholic authority. His project is polemical and nation-building: to make religious violence legible as a system, not a series of unfortunate incidents. “Tribunals” signals legality, the perverse respectability of condemnation. These aren’t mobs; they’re courtrooms. That detail is the subtextual knife: civilization is implicated.

The phrase “miserable beings” isn’t neutral either. It denies the state the comfort of calling victims heretics or criminals. Foxe strips them down to human status, deliberately vague, as if to say: whatever their theology, they were people. The intent is not merely to memorialize suffering but to weaponize memory, to harden suspicion of centralized religious power. By framing atrocity as an average, Foxe suggests something worse than cruelty: a dependable machinery of it.