From the commencement of the reign of Queen Elizabeth down to the middle of the last century, several members of the Foxe family, descendants of the great martyrologist, resided in the parish of Waltham Holy Cross. And it is asserted by several local writers that the justly celebrated John Foxe himself resided in this ancient town, where he uninterruptedly pursued his literary labours during the early part of the latter half of the sixteenth century. Tradition even points to the house in “Sun Street,” then called “East Street” in which he compiled the “Book of Martyrs.” Some have supposed that John Foxe visited the house of Mr. Cressey in the Romeland with Stephen Gardner and Henry the Eighth to consult about the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon, but that is a mistake which the writer has pleasure in correcting. It was Dr. Edward Fox (afterwards Bishop of Hereford) that figured in that scene, and not the martyrologist.

This article offers a new approach to early modern global history, dubbed (dis)entangled history as a way to combine the conventional focus on the history of connections with a necessary appreciation of the elements of disconnection and disintegration. To exemplify this approach, it offers a case study related to the history of cannibalism as both a disputed anthropophagic practice and a cultural reference point across the early modern world. Through a rich multilingual and multimedia source base, we trace how the idea of Indigenous Tapuya endo-cannibalism in Brazil travelled across the Atlantic through Europe and Africa to East Asia. The idea of Tapuya cannibalism crossed some linguistic borders, stopped at others and interacted unevenly with long-standing Ottoman, Polish, West African, Islamic and Chinese ideas about ‘cannibal countries’, of which it was just one more example. This trajectory challenges the historiographical consensus that early modern ideas about cannibalism were centred on the Atlantic world. By tracing how one particular discourse did and did not travel around the globe, this article offers not just a theoretical statement, but a ‘fleshed out’ and concrete approach to writing about intermittent connectedness during the period 1500–1800.