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Gunther’s detailed and persuasive study traces the development of radical Protestant thought in England through the mid and late 16th century. His work is a corrective to views that the tensions marking Puritanism and those holding more radical views of the church with those who supported the established church, came about only with the rise of the Puritan movement.
The volume’s stated aim is to investigate the influence of Christian theology and religious beliefs on Anglo-Saxon society. In doing so Foxhall Forbes endeavours to show the wider population’s engagement with Christian theology, which has usually been regarded as the preserve of the educated elite.
As this book begins (p. 1), the author marvels how the art of the Wycliffite Bible, one of the most popular books in late medieval England, has not been studied systematically. The answer lies in the historiography of the Wycliffite Bible. Kennedy suggests that the ‘Shadow of the Reformation’ has created a binary view of Wycliffite Bibles, linking them to heresy and illegality.
John Edwards’s new biography of Cardinal Reginald Pole, part of Ashgate’s Archbishops of Canterbury Series, is a magnificent example of first-rate historical scholarship. Reginald Pole is no easy subject.
The life of Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher (1581–1656) as primate, politician and intellectual heavyweight, offers a rich subject for study.
Have pity upon poor Andrew Melville. Once he was a towering figure in Presbyterian Scotland, John Knox’s successor as a leader of men, chastiser of proud monarchy and preacher of the truth. A student at St Andrews at the time of the Scottish Reformation, Melville spent a decade studying and teaching in France and Geneva.
Until about 15 years ago the complex history of the links between the north of Ireland and colonial America was something of a brackish backwater in 18th-century Atlantic studies. Admittedly, the internal history of Ulster Presbyterianism had already come alive, thanks to the work of David Hayton on the early 18th century, and of David Miller and Ian McBride on the final decades.
As Anna Bayman notes in her excellent new monograph, ‘[a] book about Thomas Dekker could [...] be a book about almost anything’ (p. 3). Tackling this prolific and somewhat elusive writer brings with it a host of difficulties. Dekker’s writings are generically and formally diverse, embedded within the political and moral concerns of early modern London.
As Hugh Thomas points out in his introduction to The Secular Clergy in England, the secular clergy of medieval England are an unjustly neglected group.
In Richard Baxter’s Reformed Liturgy, Glen J. Segger offers us the first monograph-length study of a fascinating ‘what if’: the failed set of proposed liturgical changes composed by Richard Baxter in the early 1660s.