A collection of essays that covers topics ranging from Thomas Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake after repeated recantations in 1556, to William Sancroft, the only other post-Reformation archbishop of Canterbury to have been deprived of office. It explores the interactions between the inclusive and exclusive tendencies in English Protestantism.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Thomas Cranmer and the Truth; 2 Godly Preachers and Zealous Magistrates in Elizabethan East Anglia: The Roots of Dissent; 3 Shepherds, Sheepdogs and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England; 4 England and International Calvinism, 1558-1640; 5 The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth-Century English Culture.

"In Patrick Collinson's From Cranmer to Sancroft, two archbishops stand as stern-faced alpha and omega for a collection of essays written by the preeminent historian of early modern religion in England. Those clerical bookends are apt, for Collinson is interested in trajectories—in beginnings and perhaps, in the case of English Christianity, ends. John Bossy once famously wrote of Elizabethan Catholicism that it was "a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations," and Collinson, in homage, states that Protestant dissent in early modern East Anglia "travels full circle from minority enthusiasm to minority enthusiasm in five or six generations" (p. 26); this volume, for its part, could be said to move from complex if weak archbishop to complex if weak archbishop, with a rich reserve of dissenters, separatists, and international Calvinists residing in between." -Sarah Covington, Catholic Historical Review, November 2008

Studying the reactions of both major and lesser-known personalities of the time, this collection of essays explores the importance of the Bible and the emergence of Puritanism inside the Church of England.