John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms. He found fame, however, as the publisher of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, also known as the Book of Martyrs, the largest and most technologically accomplished book printed in sixteenth-century England.
Woodcut of Day (dated 1562) included in the 1563 and subsequent editions of Actes and Monuments
A page from Cuningham's Cosmographical Glasse printed by Day in 1559
Woodcut from Day's 1563 first printing of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments depicting the execution of Thomas Cranmer, 1556
Woodcut from John Foxe's Actes and Monuments depicting the burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley in 1555
John Foxe was an English clergyman, theologian, and historian, notable for his martyrology Actes and Monuments, telling of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, but particularly the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century and in the reign of Mary I. The book was widely owned and read by English Puritans and helped to mould British opinion on the Catholic Church for several centuries.
John Foxe
A page from the first edition of Actes and Monuments, also known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in 1563.
Dual martyrdom by burning, 1558; from a 1641 edition of Foxe.
Foxe, engraving by Martin Droeshout