St Andrews Studies in Reformation History – serie

The English Civil War was a time of disruption, suffering and persecution for many people, not least the clergy of the established church, who found themselves ejected from their livings in increasing numbers as Parliamentarian forces extended their control across the country. Yet, historians have tended to downplay their suffering, preferring in most cases to concentrate instead upon the persecution suffered by dissenters after the Restoration. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources - most notably the remarkable set of family and parish memories collected by John Walker in the early years of the eighteenth century - this book refocuses attention on the experiences of the sequestered loyalist clergy during the turbulent years of the 1640s and 1650s. The study highlights how the experiences of the clergy can help illuminate events in wider society, whilst at the same time acknowledging the unique situation in which Church of England ministers found themselves. For although the plundering, imprisonment and personal loss of the clergy was probably indicative of the experiences of many ordinary people on middle incomes, the ever present religious dimension to the conflict ensured particular attention was paid to those holding religious office. During the war and interregnum, zealous religious reformers attacked every aspect of established religion, targeting both existing institutions and those who supported them. Clergy were ejected on an unprecedented scale, suffering much violence and persecution and branded as 'malignants' and 'baal's priests'. By re-examining their history, the book offers a balanced assessment of the persecution, challenging many preconceptions about the ejected loyalists, and providing new insights into the experiences and legacies of this influential group.

Music was, in some form or another, a pastime enjoyed by all in sixteenth-century society, and a fundamental part of their lives. It was both through the use of music and partly as a result of its existence that many religious changes occurred during the Reformation. This book explores the part played by music, especially group singing, in the unfolding of the Protestant reforms in Strasbourg. It considers both ecclesiastical and ’popular’ songs in the city, examining how both genres fitted into people’s lives during this time of strife, and how the provision and dissemination of music as a whole affected, and in turn was affected by, the new ecclesiastical arrangement. Whilst it would be naive to assume that the congregations were transformed from impious to pious overnight as the result of the introduction of German hymns, it is clear that there were real and concerted efforts on the part of reformers to get people to embrace the new faith, and writing hymns for them to sing was central to the process. Drawing upon a range of sources - including liturgical orders and hymnals, polemical songs, chronicles of the Reformation and text manuscripts - the book explores the methods by which new songs were introduced in Strasbourg churches, and suggests how congregations might have learnt them. In so doing it provides an account of the process by which reformers found music a place in the new Church, and used it to promote their wider reform agenda.

This review brings together new research in three areas of Anabaptist studies and the Radical Reformation. Part One focuses on sixteenth-century Anabaptism, re-examining the ’polygenesis model’ of Anabaptism articulated by Stayer, Packull and Depperman. Part Two deals with the connections between Anabaptists and other Reformation dissenters, their marginalisation as social groups and their relations with the intellectual movements of the age. The final section addresses historiographic and comparative issues of writing the history of marginalised groups, investigating some preconceptions which influence historians’ approaches to Anabaptism and their implications for understanding other religious groups.

This volume is an examination of the debate over clerical marriage in Reformation polemic, and of its impact on the English clergy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Clerical celibacy was more than an abstract theological concept; it was a central image of mediaeval Catholicism which was shattered by the doctrinal iconoclasm of Protestant reformers. This study sets the debate over clerical marriage within the context of the key debates of the Reformation, offering insights into the nature of the reformers’ attempts to break with the Catholic past, and illustrating the relationship between English polemicists and their continental counterparts. The debate was not without practical consequences, and the author sets this study of polemical arguments alongside an analysis of the response of clergy in several English dioceses to the legalisation of clerical marriage in 1549. Conclusions are based upon the evidence of wills, visitation records, and the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts. Despite the printed rhetoric, dogmatic certainties were often beyond the reach of the majority, and the author’s conclusions highlight the chasm which could exist between polemical ideal and practical reality during the turmoil of the Reformation.

This volume is comprised of thirteen essays that explore penitential teachings and practices from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries in Western Europe and its colonies. Together the essays reveal that in this period, penitence was an increasingly important force shaping the individual and society. Consequently, the authors argue, penitence is central to our understanding of early modern Christianity as it was taught and experienced in everyday life. From Germany to France and to the Americas, Catholics turned to traditional forms of penitence not only to save individual souls, but also to assert their confessional identity. For their part, Protestants established distinctive penitential approaches and institutions in accordance with their own understandings of sin and salvation. In thus examining the treatment of post-baptismal sin across chronological and confessional boundaries, the volume breaks new ground in the history of penance. The volume concludes with a postscript assessing the ways in which the essays enrich the current state of scholarship on penitence and encourage further research. Katharine Jackson Lualdi is an independent scholar. Anne T. Thayer is Assistant Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The degree to which the English Protestant Reformation was a reflection of genuine popular piety as opposed to a political necessity imposed by the country's rulers has been a source of lively historical debate in recent years. Whilst numerous arguments and documentary sources have been marshalled to explain how this most fundamental restructuring of English society came about, most historians have tended to divide the sixteenth century into pre and post-Reformation halves, reinforcing the inclination to view the Reformation as a watershed between two intellectually and culturally opposed periods. In contrast, this study takes a longer and more integrated approach. Through the prism of charity and lay piety, as expressed in the wills and testaments taken from selected London parishes, it charts the shifting religious ideas about salvation and the nature and causes of poverty in early modern London and England across a hundred and twenty year period. Studying the evolution of lay piety through the long stretch of the period 1500 to 1620, Claire Schen unites pre-Reformation England with that which followed, helping us understand how 'Reformations' or a 'Long Reformation' happened in London. Through the close study of wills and testaments she offers a convincing cultural and social history of sixteenth century Londoners and their responses to religious innovations and changing community policy.

Recent research has begun to highlight the importance of German arguments about legitimate resistance and self-defence for French, English and Scottish Protestants. This book systematically studies the reception of German thought in England, arguing that it played a much greater role than has hitherto been acknowledged. Both the Marian exiles, and others concerned with the fate of continental Protestantism, eagerly read what German reformers had to say about the possibility of resisting the religious policies of a monarch without compromising the institution of monarchy itself. However, the transfer of German arguments to England, with its individual political and constitutional environment, necessarily involved the subtle transformation of these arguments into forms compatible with local traditions. In this way, German arguments contributed significantly to the emergence of new theories, emphasising natural rights.

How did Christians in early modern Western Europe express their sense of community? This book explores the various ways in which religious identities were defined, developed and defended - within both Protestant and Roman Catholic contexts, in England and on the Continent - over a period vital for the history of Christianity. As such it will be of interest not only to historians of religion but also to students of social and cultural history in general.

Drawing primarily from Suffolk sources, this book explores the development and place of Protestantism in early modern society, defined as much in terms of its practice in local communities as in its more public pronouncements from those in authority. Using detailed analysis of four communities, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and Hadleigh, John Craig explores the responses and initiatives of these towns to the question of the Reformation in the 16th century. A fascinating picture emerges of the preoccupations and priorities of particular groups. The political goals and consciousness of townsmen and tradesmen are examined, and the problems of analyzing the evidence for ascribing religious motivations to urban factions are highlighted. The case of Hadleigh addresses some aspects of the connection often made between the growth of Protestantism and the incidence of social division and conflict. These local studies provide the basis for a broader perspective on urban reformation in East Anglia.

This study comprises the proceedings of a conference held in St Andrews in 1999 which gathered some of the most distinguished historians of the French book. It presents the 16th-century book in a new context and provides the first comprehensive view of this absorbing field. Four major themes are reflected here: the relationship between the manuscript tradition and the printed book; an exploration of the variety of genres that emerged in the 16th century and how they were used; a look at publishing and book-selling strategies and networks, and the ways in which the authorities tried to control these; and a discussion of the way in which confessional literature diverged and converged. The range of specialist knowledge embedded in this study will ensure its appeal to specialists in French history, scholars of the book and of 16th-century French literature, and historians of religion.

Catholic polemical works, and their portrayal of Protestants in print in particular, are the central focus of this work. In contrast with Germany, French Catholics used printing effectively and agressively to promote the Catholic cause. In seeking to explain why France remained a Catholic country, the French Catholic response must be taken into account. Rather than confront the Reformation on its own terms, the Catholic reaction concentrated on discrediting the Protestant cause in the eyes of the Catholic majority. This book aims to contribute to the ongoing debate over the nature of the French Wars of Religion, to explain why they were so violent and why they engaged the loyalities of such a large portion of the population. This study also provides an example of the successful defence of catholicism developed independently and in advance of Tridentine reform which is of wider significance for the history of the Reformation in Europe.

This case study examines the history of the Netherlandic Mennonite community living in and around Hamburg after the Thirty Years War. Based on detailed archival research, it expands the scope of Radical Reformation studies to include the confessional age (c. 1550-1750). During this period Mennonites had to conform politically while trying to preserve many of the nonconformist ideals of their forebears, such as the refusal to baptize children, bear arms and swear solemn oaths. The research presented in Obedient Heretics will, therefore, be of interest to scholars of minority communities in addition to those concerned with the Reformation's legacy, confessionalization and confessional identity.

Between 1535 and 1603, more than 200 English Catholics were executed by the State for treason. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary sources, Anne Dillon examines the ways in which these executions were transformed into acts of martyrdom. Utilizing the reports from the gallows, the Catholic community in England and in exile created a wide range of manuscripts and texts in which they employed the concept of martyrdom for propaganda purposes in continental Europe and for shaping Catholic identity and encouraging recusancy at home. Particularly potent was the derivation of images from these texts which provided visual means of conveying the symbol of the martyr. Through an examination of the work of Richard Verstegan and the martyr murals of the English College in Rome, the book explores the influence of these images on the Counter Reformation Church, the Jesuits, and the political intentions of English Catholics in exile and those of their hosts. The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 shows how Verstegan used the English martyrs in his Theatrum crudelitatum of 1587 to rally support from Catholics on the Continent for a Spanish invasion of England to overthrow Elizabeth I and her government. The English martyr was, Anne Dillon argues, as much a construction of international, political rhetoric as it was of English religious and political debate; an international Catholic banner around which Catholic European powers were urged to rally.

Interest in John Foxe and his hugely influential text Acts and Monuments is particularly vibrant at present. This volume, the third to arise from a series of international colloquia on Foxe, collects essays by established and up-and-coming scholars. It broadly embraces five major areas of early modern studies: Roman Catholicism, women and gender, visual culture, the history of the book and historiography. Patrick Collinson provides an entire overview of the field of Foxe studies and further essays place Foxe and his work within the context of their times.

This book considers the emergence of a remarkable diversity of churches in east-central Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, which included Catholic, Orthodox, Hussite, Lutheran, Bohemian Brethren, Calvinist, anti-Trinitarian and Greek Catholic communities. Contributors assess the extraordinary multiplicity of confessions in the Transylvanian principality, as well as the range of churches in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary. Essays focus on how each church sought to establish its own identity in a crowded market-place of religious ideas, and on the extent to which printed literature brokered the popular reception of religious doctrine. The volume addresses how ideas about religion spread within the largely illiterate societies of east-central Europe, especially through catechisms, and how printed literature was used to instruct congregations about doctrinal truth, to encourage the faithful to pious devotions, and to shape the religious life and identity of local communities.

Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury, was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century - antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items, including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the Renaissance. Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions), together with necessary identification and comment. The first three volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in their own right. This first volume covers the crucial turning point in Pole’s career: his protracted break with Henry and the substitution of papal service for royal. One major dimension of this rupture was a profound religious conversion which took Pole to the brink of one of the defining moments of the Italian Reformation, the writing of the ’Beneficio di Christo’.

Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury, was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century - antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items, including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the Renaissance. Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions), together with necessary identification and comment. The first three volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in their own right. This first volume covers the crucial turning point in Pole’s career: his protracted break with Henry and the substitution of papal service for royal. One major dimension of this rupture was a profound religious conversion which took Pole to the brink of one of the defining moments of the Italian Reformation, the writing of the ’Beneficio di Christo’.

Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury, was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century - antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items, including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the Renaissance. Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions), together with necessary identification and comment. The first three volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in their own right. This first volume covers the crucial turning point in Pole’s career: his protracted break with Henry and the substitution of papal service for royal. One major dimension of this rupture was a profound religious conversion which took Pole to the brink of one of the defining moments of the Italian Reformation, the writing of the ’Beneficio di Christo’.

Reginald Pole (1500-1558), cardinal and archbishop of Canterbury, was at the centre of reform controversies in the mid 16th century - antagonist of Henry VIII, a leader of the reform group in the Roman Church, and nearly elected pope (Julius III was elected in his stead). His voluminous correspondence - more than 2500 items, including letters to him - forms a major source for historians not only of England, but of Catholic Europe and the early Reformation as a whole. In addition to the insight they provide on political history, both secular and ecclesiastical, and on the spiritual motives of reform, they also constitute a great resource for our understanding of humanist learning and cultural patronage in the Renaissance. Hitherto there has been no comprehensive, let alone modern or accurate listing and analysis of this correspondence, in large part due to the complexity of the manuscript traditions and the difficulties of legibility. The present work makes this vast body of material accessible to the researcher, summarising each letter (and printing key texts usually in critical editions), together with necessary identification and comment. The first three volumes in this set will contain the correspondence; the fourth and fifth will provide a biographical companion to all persons mentioned, and will together constitute a major research tool in their own right. This first volume covers the crucial turning point in Pole’s career: his protracted break with Henry and the substitution of papal service for royal. One major dimension of this rupture was a profound religious conversion which took Pole to the brink of one of the defining moments of the Italian Reformation, the writing of the ’Beneficio di Christo’.

De Unione Insulae Britannicae (The British Union) is a unique seventeenth-century tract that urged the fusion of the Scottish and English kingdoms into a new British commonwealth with a radically new British identity. Its author, David Hume of Godscroft (1558-c.1630) was a major intellectual figure in Jacobean Scotland and the leading Scottish critic of the anglicizing policies of James VI. The tract was written in two parts. Published in London in 1605, the first part provides a general outline of the imperative of union. The second consists of political and constitutional proposals whereby such a union might be achieved. Its publication was suppressed and it exists only in manuscript. This is the first translation of the tract. Hume's work is breathtakingly contemporary in some of the proposals that it makes; regional assemblies combined with a national parliament, and a call for efforts to inspire the Scottish and English people into a sense of common purpose. The language and ideas of the tract display characteristics of the Renaissance combined with elements that visibly anticipate the Enlightenment. The De Unione offers extraordinary insight into the European intellectual world prior to the rise of romantic nationalism in the early nineteenth century.

Over the first four decades of the Reformation, hundreds of songs written in popular styles and set to well-known tunes appeared across the German territories. These polemical songs included satires on the pope or on Martin Luther, ballads retelling historical events, translations of psalms and musical sermons. They ranged from ditties of one strophe to didactic Lieder of fifty or more. Luther wrote many such songs and this book contends that these songs, and the propagandist ballads they inspired, had a greater effect on the German people than Luther’s writings or his sermons. Music was a major force of propaganda in the German Reformation. Rebecca Wagner Oettinger examines a wide selection of songs and the role they played in disseminating Luther’s teachings to a largely non-literate population, while simultaneously spreading subversive criticism of Catholicism. These songs formed an intersection for several forces: the comfortable familiarity of popular music, historical theories on the power of music, the educational beliefs of sixteenth-century theologians and the need for sense of community and identity during troubled times. As Oettinger demonstrates, this music, while in itself simple, provides us with a new understanding of what most people in sixteenth-century Germany knew of the Reformation, how they acquired their knowledge and the ways in which they expressed their views about it. With full details of nearly 200 Lieder from this period provided in the second half of the book, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation is both a valuable investigation of music as a political and religious agent and a useful resource for future research.

This collection of nine essays, with an introduction by Richard Griffiths, examines some of the broad themes relating to the way in which the reading, translation and interpretation of the Bible in the Renaissance could serve the specific and often practical aims of those involved. Moving from humanist issues concerned with the nature of the sacred texts and methods for interpreting them, the volume examines the uses of the Bible in different contexts, and looks at the social, political and religious impact of its translations in the sixteenth century.

Despite the importance of the subject to contemporaries, this is the first monograph to look at the institution of godparenthood in early modern English society. Utilising a wealth of hitherto largely neglected primary source data, this work explores godparenthood, using it as a framework to illuminate wider issues of spiritual kinship and theological change. It has become increasingly common for general studies of family and religious life in pre-industrial England to make reference to the spiritual kinship evident in the institution of godparenthood. However, although there have been a number of important studies of the impact of the institution in other periods, this is the first detailed monograph devoted to the subject in early modern England. This study is possible due to the survival, contrary to many expectations, of relatively large numbers of parish registers that recorded the identities of godparents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By utilising this hitherto largely neglected data, in conjunction with evidence gleaned from over 20,000 Wills and numerous other biographical, legal and theological sources, Coster has been able to explore fully the institution of godparenthood and the role it played in society. This book takes the opportunity to study an institution which interacted with a range of social and cultural factors, and to assess the nature of these elements within early modern English society. It also allows the findings of such an investigation to be compared with the assumptions that have been made about the fortunes of the institution in the context of a changing European society. The recent historiography of religion in this period has focused attention on popular elements of religious practice, and stressed the conservatism of a society faced with dramatic theological and ritual change. In this context a study of godparenthood can make a contribution to understanding how religious change occurred and the ways in which popular religious practice was affected.

Focusing on the territories of the Holy Roman Empire from the early Reformation to the mid-eighteenth century, this volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays examines some of the structures, practices and media of communication that helped shape the social, cultural, and political history of the period. Not surprisingly, print was an important focal point, but it was only one medium through which individuals and institutions constructed publics and communicated with an audience. Religious iconography and ritual, sermons, music, civic architecture, court ceremony, street gossip, acts of violence, are also forms of communication explored in the volume. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines and scholarly backgrounds, this volume transcends narrow specializations and will be of interest to a broad range of academics seeking to understand the social, political and cultural consequences of the "information revolution" of Reformation Europe.

Why did the Reformation take root in some places and not others? Although many factors were involved, the varying character of penitential preaching across Europe in the decades prior to the Reformation was an especially important contributor to the subsequent receptivity of evangelical ideas. In this book, several collections of model sermons are studied to provide an overview of late medieval teaching on penitence. What emerges is a pattern of differing emphases in different geographical locations, with the characteristic emphases of the penitential message in each region suggesting how such teaching prepared the ground for both the appeal and the reputation of Luther's message. People heard and interpreted the new theology using the late medieval penitential understandings and expectations they had been taught. The variety of teaching found in the Church left different regions vulnerable or resistant to evangelical critiques and alternatives. Despite current academic claims that the establishment of the Reformation cannot have resulted from lay religious understanding, this study offers evidence that theological ideas did reach beyond religious elites to promote a degree of popular support for the Reformation.

In the immediate years and months before the outbreak of religious war in 1562 the growth of Protestantism in France had gone unchecked, and an overriding sense of Protestant triumphalism emerged in cities across the land. However, the wars unleashed a vigorous Catholic reaction that extinguished Protestant hopes of ultimate success. This offensive triggered violence across the provinces, paralysing Huguenot communities and sending many Protestant churches in northern France into terminal decline. But French Protestantism was never a uniform phenomenon and events in southern France took a rather different course from those in the north. This study explores the fate of the Huguenot community in the area of its greatest strength in southern France. The book examines the Protestant ascendancy in the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban through the period of the religious wars, laying open the impact that the new religion had upon the town and its surrounding locality, and the way in which the town related to the wider political and religious concerns of the Protestant south. In particular, it probes the way in which the town related to the nobility, the political assemblies, Henry of Navarre and the wider world of international Calvinism, reflecting upon the distinctive cultural elements that characterised Calvinism in southern France.

Women, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Venice is the first study to investigate systematically the moral policies of both Church and State in the age of Counter-Reformation confessionalisation in Venice. Examining ecclesiastical and civil lawsuits related to illicit sex, broken marriage promises and disrupted marriages of artisan and ordinary women and men, Daniela Hacke can convincingly show how central sexual morality was to the patriarchal society of sixteenth and seventeenth century Venice. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the author skilfully reconstructs what gender difference meant in daily life, in courtship rituals, marital disputes, and in sexual relations. In the streets and in the courts, women and men fought not only over proper gender behaviour within and outside marriage, but also about the meaning of conjugality and of domestic patriarchy. Neighbours played an active role in mediating between distressed partners and between children and parents. Their interventions and perceptions reveal much about the moral values and the networks of support within a fascinatingly heterogeneous community such as early modern Venice. The study makes important contributions to the fields of gender history, social history and the history of crime and sexuality.

The figure of William Cecil dominates the court of Elizabeth I, and next to the queen herself, no one did more to shape the political, religious and economic landscape of late sixteenth century England. Nowhere is this influence more evident than in the ecclesiastical settlements that Elizabeth imposed on a country wracked by religious divisions and uncertainty. At the very heart of this settlement lay the question of the role of the bishops, and it is to this problem that Cecil was to devote much time and energy. Broadening our understanding of the Elizabethan Church, this study utilises a number of hitherto underused primary sources to re-examine the vexed issue of the role of bishops. It addresses the question of why certain men were appointed bishops whilst others, often seemingly better qualified, were passed over. Taking a broadly chronological approach, this book argues that Cecil, a committed protestant, hoped to remodel espiscopacy along 'reformed' continental lines. Rather than great princes of the church, Cecil envisaged 'superintendents' shorn of much of their traditional temporal power and wealth. Charting the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign it is shown how Cecil tried to convince the queen to abandon the established economic foundations of 'prelacy' in favour of a properly funded superintendency. In this he failed. Yet as long as Cecil remained a dominating voice at the council table the Church of England, through the mediation of a bench of conscientious and hard-working (if often hard-pressed) bishops, was assured of a broad base and an evangelical future. The remainder of Cecil's career, from 1577 to 1598, will be dealt with in a subsequent volume Lord Burghley and Episcopacy.

Johann von Staupitz is generally acknowledged as one of the most important influences on Martin Luther, convincing him of the sin-remitting grace of God. It was this revelation that was to spur Luther to formulate his theology of salvation by faith alone which was to lead to his break with the Catholic church. When Luther was brought to task by the church authorities for his heretical views it was Staupitz who was deputed to remonstrate with him, and it was Staupitz who sent a copy of his theses on indulgences to the Pope. Despite Luther's defection from Rome, he was to remain on good terms with the orthodox Staupitz who was consistently at the forefront of reformation within the Catholic Church. This book sheds light on the spiritual and theological beliefs of Staupitz, placing him in the midst of the late medieval reform efforts in the Augustianian order. It argues that as reformer, sermonizer, and friend of humanists Staupitz was a major player in the world of early sixteenth century theology who had a profound influence on the course of the Reformation.