Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism. By Patrick Collinson. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xvii + 238 pp. $75.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Richard and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism . By Patrick Collinson . Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2013. xvii + 238 pp. $75.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is the last book from Patrick Collinson, premier historian of English Puritanism. Collinson showed himself a master in his magisterial work, The Elizabethan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Through many works since, Collinson demonstrated his wide understandings of the context of the movement called in its many forms and variations. He finished this book as he was dying (d. September 28, 2011) and entrusted the work to press under the guidance of Alexandra Walsham and John Morrill. The book is vintage Collinson, wide-ranging in understanding, deft in style, and packed with illuminating insights.This volume traverses ground Collinson covered in his seminal work. But here he focuses on the developing movement for Presbyterianism as a polity of reform for the Church of England during the second half of the sixteenth century. The protagonist is the archenemy of Puritans and Presbyterians: Richard (1544-1610). was chaplain to Lord Chancellor Hatton and then Archbishop Whitgift. He became Bishop of London (1597) and vigorously sought to uncover and stamp out the dangerous viewpoints he believed were subversive and revolutionary in their intent and threatened the church and its monarch. Given Whitgift's infirmities, virtually functioned as Archbishop and wielded enormous power (189).The book is not a biography of Bancroft, per se . It is, says Collinson, an extended pre-history of the controversial prelate, who was the 'arch Anti-Puritan' (1). Indeed, extreme hostility to Puritanism makes up a great deal of what we know of in his first sixty or so years (2). Bancroft's Daungerous Positions and Proceedings . . . under Pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbityeriall Discipline along with his The Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (both 1593) were a detailed chronological summary of bodies of evidence amassed against the presbyterial movements and their participants; and a survey of what he considered the main tenets and infrastructure of Presbyterianism. Of Daungerous Positions , Collinson says: No more tendentious history of the churches calling themselves Reformed, and especially of their representation in the British Isles, was ever perpetrated (8-9). Theologically, Collinson indicates that Bancroft shared with Elizabethan Catholics a profound hatred, if not for John Calvin, for the Calvinism which he created in Geneva (26).Bancroft began his battles by using the writings of Robert Browne and Robert Harrison, who advocated church reform not tarrying for the magistrate and stressed the need for the church to be composed of the visible godly, to accuse them of the early church heresies of Montanism and Donatism (30).The 1580s saw the establishment of regular conferences of Puritan clergy whose actions came to be known as the Dedham Classis a kind of Presbyterianism in informal and unauthorised action (42). The growing network of those who wanted church reform became more institutionalized--which identified as a badge of disciplined Precisianists--his preferred term for Puritans. …