Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-puritanism

This major new study is an exploration of the Elizabethan Puritan movement through the eyes of its most determined and relentless opponent, Richard Bancroft, later Archbishop of Canterbury. It analyses his obsession with the perceived threat to the stability of the church and state presented by the advocates of radical presbyterian reform. The book forensically examines Bancroft's polemical tracts and archive of documents and letters, casting important new light on religious politics and culture. Focussing on the ways in which anti-Puritanism interacted with Puritanism, it also illuminates the process by which religious identities were forged in the early modern era. The final book of Patrick Collinson, the pre-eminent historian of sixteenth-century England, this is the culmination of a lifetime of seminal work on the English Reformation and its ramifications.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.