A major study of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, as seen through the eyes of its most determined opponent, Richard Bancroft.

Preface Alexandra Walsham and John Morrill; 1. Introduction; 2. Beginnings; 3. Battle commences; 4. The 1580s: Whitgift, Hatton and the High Commission; 5. Martin Marprelate; 6. What Bancroft found, and didn't find, in the godly ministers' studies; 7. Out of the frying pan, into the fire and out again; 8. Prayer, fasting, and the world of spirits: the other face; 9. Possession, dispossession, fraud and polemics; 10. Richard Bancroft, Robert Cecil and the Jesuits: the Bishop and his Catholic friends; 11. Archbishop of Canterbury.

Patrick Collinson CBE (1929-2011) was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge (1988-96) and a Fellow of Trinity College and the British Academy. The leading historian of sixteenth-century religion and politics of his generation, he was the author of many important books, notably The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (1982) and The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988). He also published several collections of his essays, including Godly People (1983), Elizabethan Essays (1994), From Cranmer to Sancroft (2006) and This England (2011).