From Cranmer to Sancroft

Patrick Collinson, Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, is the author of Godly People and The Religion of Protestants.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Thomas Cranmer and the Truth; 2 Godly Preachers and Zealous Magistrates in Elizabethan East Anglia: The Roots of Dissent; 3 Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England; 4 England and International Calvinism, 1558-1640; 5 The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture.

"In Patrick Collinson's From Cranmer to Sancroft, two archbishops stand as stern-faced alpha and omega for a collection of essays written by the preeminent historian of early modern religion in England. Those clerical bookends are apt, for Collinson is interested in trajectories—in beginnings and perhaps, in the case of English Christianity, ends. John Bossy once famously wrote of Elizabethan Catholicism that it was "a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations," and Collinson, in homage, states that Protestant dissent in early modern East Anglia "travels full circle from minority enthusiasm to minority enthusiasm in five or six generations" (p. 26); this volume, for its part, could be said to move from complex if weak archbishop to complex if weak archbishop, with a rich reserve of dissenters, separatists, and international Calvinists residing in between." -Sarah Covington, Catholic Historical Review, November 2008