Although Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is now known principally as the author of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in his lifetime the Tractates and Sermons brought him greater notoriety. Hooker's views on justification, the perseverance of faith, and the relationship of the Church of Rome to the reformed Church of England were widely reported, and texts of the tracts were extensively circulated in manuscript. Thanks to the meticulous editing of Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the contemporary impact of these debates can now be appreciated for the first time. These tracts provide a unique perspective on the turbulent world of late Elizabethan theology. In addition, they lay the doctrinal foundations of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity itself and--with the excellent commentary of Egil Grislis, Professor of Theology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg enable us to trace the intellectual formation of sixteenth-century England's most innovative and provocative theologian. The volume includes a newly discovered letter; three newly attributed sermon fragments; and analysis by P. F. Forte of Hooker's distinctive preaching style.

Revisionist study of the wall-paintings of Salisbury Cathedral, setting them in the context of thirteenth-century religious reform.

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’.

In Defiance of Time contends that the antiquarian project, integral to early modern literary and intellectual culture, depended on the antiquaries' capacity to restore - in their imagination at least - the fragments of the past. It offers original readings of important authors such as Leland, Stow, Spenser, Camden, Drayton, and Selden.

This book charts the eccentric career of William Palmer of Magdalen, the only member of the Oxford Movement to take a serious interest in the Orthodox Church. Ordained an Anglican deacon, Palmer was destined for a conventional life as a classics don at Oxford, but in 1840 and 1842 he travelled to Russia to seek communion from the Russian Orthodox Church, on the basis that the Anglican Church was part of the Catholic and Apostolic Church world-wide. Despite their personal regard for him, the Russians remained unconvinced by his arguments, not least because of the actions of the Anglican hierarchy in forming alliances with other Protestant bodies. Palmer for his part exposed the logical inconsistencies in the claim of the Orthodox to be the one true church. Increasingly disillusioned with the Church of England, and finding himself without support from the Scottish Episcopal Church, Palmer was urged by his Russian friends such as Mouravieff and Khomiakoff to convert to Orthodoxy. However, he baulked at making the cultural leap from West to East, and could not accept the Orthodox inconsistency over rebaptism and chrismation. After some years in ecclesiastical limbo, he followed the example of his Oxford friends such as Newman, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in Rome in 1855. He lived in Rome as a Catholic layman until his death in 1879.