Victorian Protestantism and Bloody Mary

This is an important and interesting book on aspects of our religious heritage which until now have escaped the investigation of scholars. History is all too often employed as a weapon for smiting the& 34;infidel.& 34; So it was among religiously-minded people in 19th century England. By the beginning of the Victorian era, after the somnolence of the 18th century, religious enthusiasm among both clergy and laity in the established Church revived. This brought about such acrimonious differences it was a wonder they could be accommodated in the same Church. Provoked by a group of Oxford scholars who sought to show that the Church of England was neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant but a middle way between the two, Protestant militants were aroused to demonstrate against and even disrupt church services of which they disapproved. To remind English men and women of the glories of the Reformation they erected memorials in many towns to celebrate the heroic reputation of the martyrs who suffered in the reign of& 39;Bloody Mary.& 39;Memorials required names and to find out who the victims were and where they met their end the memorial committees turned to the pages of John Foxe& 39;s Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs, better known as Foxe& 39;s Book of Martyrs. A most effective work of propaganda in the days of religious warfare, it was reprinted in new editions. Now the target was no longer the Church of Rome, but the Anglo-Catholics or the alleged& 39;Romanisers.& 39...