Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church

This essay seeks to explain the least celebrated of Patrick Collinson's books. It begins by looking at how it has seemed to be too much under the shadow of its predecessor, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, and had a little imprudently been preceded by three essays that rather stole its thunder. Too many scholars have wrongly thought what was left was the husk rather than the kernel of Edmund Grindal. So they missed a masterly marriage of deep and informed study of diocesan records with a command of the treacherous currents of ecclesiastical politics in Whitehall and Lambeth. What is more, Collinson offers a long?sighted account of Grindal's importance for the subsequent history of the Church of England down to the time of Sacheverell Affair (1709–10), and a brilliant analysis of his marginalia in books now in an Oxford Library. The essay suggests that Grindal is made too central and too representative of post?Reformation evangelical Protestantism, while at the same time the roles of John Jewel, Arthur Lake and others are overlooked, but it commends the book as one of the rare accounts of a public career in the Church in the later sixteenth century. The essay ends by looking at Collinson's continuing passion for seeing the Reformation through the lens of individuals’ lives.