"Nor is it any longer profitable to debate whether certain episodes in the Book of Martyrs were Foxe's own invention, or accepted by him as factual in such a casual fashion as to bring his credibility into general question. It was natural that readers should have doubted the facts of the bizarre episode in Guernsey, when a woman reportedly gave birth in the fire and the newly born infant was tossed back into the flames to share the mother's grisly fate. The circumstances stretch credulity. But it appears from other documents that this obscenity indeed happened very much as Foxe reported it. If there were any remaining doubts about Foxe's fundamental honesty in such respects, they were removed by J. F. Mozley's scholarly albeit overly defensive study published in 1940, John Foxe and his Book. Acts and Monuments is stuffed with as many detailed and minor errors as we should expect of a history written on this scale and in great haste, in Foxe's words "so hastily raked up...in such shortness of time". There are mistakes of both person and place, mistakes of dates in plenty, faults of transcription and in proof-reading. But the only elements of pure invention (and not primarily Foxe's own invention) occur in the recounting of sundry extraordinary "providences" and other acts of divine judgment visited upon those responsible for the deaths of the martyrs: fragments in the manner of the De mortibus persecutorum of Lactantius."
January 1, 1970