From Cranmer to Sancroft: English Religion in the Age of Reformation
Patrick Collinson
This collection of essays is set in the space between two most extraordinary archiepiscopal careers in post-medieval English history. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake after repeated recantations, including, at the last, the retraction of his recantations. What was the truth about Cranmer? William Sancroft, the only other post-Reformation archbishop of Canterbury to have been deprived of his office, died in great obscurity in his native Suffolk village of Fressingfield. He had refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the revolutionary sovereigns, William and Mary, remaining loyal to James 11. Yet his passive resistance to the Catholic James had earlier taken him to the Tower. Sancroft was an Anglican but also a Protestant who, echoing the martyr bishops, could declare that, by the Reformation, God had 'kindled and set up a light in Christendom which shall never be extinguished'. Patrick Collinson's latest essays, like his earlier collection, Godly People, explore the complex interaction of inclusive and exclusive tendencies in English Protestantism through a series of national, local and biographical studies.
320 pages November 1998
1 85285 111 X Cased £38.00