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.

Some of the sons and grandsons of the English Reformation, the 'hotter sort', were known to their contemporaries as 'puritans', but they called themselves 'the godly'. This career-spanning collection of essays by Patrick Collinson, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, deals with numerous aspects of the religious culture of post-Reformation England and its implications for the politics, mentality, and social relations of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans.