The battered state of Nicholas Tyacke's DPhil. thesis in the Bodleian in the 1980s, held together by the few remaining strings in its binding, was a testament to the precocious impact that it, and he, made on early modern English historiography. Between the publication of a brief foretaste in The origins of the English civil war in 1973 and the appearance of the much-revised ‘book of the thesis’ in 1987, scholars travelled to Oxford to pay homage to what was undoubtedly one of the most important early-modern doctoral dissertations since Patrick Collinson's magnum opus on Puritanism in 1967. Given the controversy it aroused, his central idea hardly needs outlining here: challenging the assumptions of the Whig approach to the English revolution, he pointed to the way in which a minority of ‘Arminians’ had attacked and replaced the dominance of Calvinism in the early seventeenth century. Whether they agreed or disagreed with him (and most have tended to fall into the latter camp) historians have in the following years had fundamentally to alter the way in which they formulated their ideas about early modern English religious history and the origins of the English Civil War. Tyacke's subsequent work has both deepened and extended his early insights, demonstrating an impressive ability both to master detail and to think broadly and synthetically. This Festshrift, unsurprisingly, had no difficulty in attracting a wide range of distinguished historians, who neatly reflect Tyacke's twin abilities to operate in micro- and macrocosm. Amongst those opting for the broad sweep, Diarmaid MacCulloch repositions the Church of England in the map of Protestant Europe, and offers a speculative but nevertheless important revision of our assumptions about the transition from early Lutheranism to later Calvinism, pointing to the neglected importance of Zurich and Bullinger in shaping the Church's theology and approach to discipline. Peter Lake revisits his earlier treatment of the structures of anti-popery and applies the same analytical skills to anti-Puritanism. In two enjoyable pieces, Tom Freeman provides a much-needed survey of that most wonderful of stories, Joan, the fecund female pope, whilst Keith Thomas offers an overview of ‘Art and iconoclasm in early modern England’, which includes a warning fact about the danger of iconoclasts' in-breeding – that Quakers, by the nineteenth century, were nearly twice as likely to be colour-blind as the rest of the population. In a narrowly focused but far-reaching paper, Anthony Milton looks at John Overall, in an effort to find the early-seventeenth century roots of that vague, even non-existent concept, Anglicanism. Milton argues that Overall's concerns – not just his opposition to narrow interpretations of predestination, but his ceremonial preferences, his elevated view of the eucharist, his support for auricular confession, his moderate approach to Catholicism, hostile attitude to Puritanism and his consequent repositioning of the Church of England – all these presage later Laudian concerns. More than that, despite caution in the face of stern Calvinist opposition, his reluctance to write for public consumption, and his resort to Latin when he did, Milton shows how Overall's influence percolated into the structures of the Church of England to emerge triumphant at the Restoration. Have we therefore discovered, as Milton suggests, the first divine ‘to create for the Church of England a coherent theological identity’ (p. 171) – that mysterious via media? Finally, Richard Cust explores the royalist use of that universal motif, providence, demonstrating the extent of Charles's guilt at allowing the execution of Strafford by showing how he interpreted all his subsequent misfortunes as God's just judgement.

Amongst the miniatures, Paul Seaver assesses what the dedications in books tell us about the relationship between Puritans and their patrons. Brett Usher tests Tyacke's contention that it was possible to trace a continuous Puritan tradition from the 1590s to the civil war by looking at the first two of Tyacke's key trio of ‘money, organization and ideology’, taking as his starting point the rise to prominence of a provincial pastor, Thomas Crooke, appointed preacher at Gray's Inn in 1581, tracing how his moderate Puritanism descended through his sons (educated at Emmanuel) and his daughter (who married Stephen Egerton). Susan Hardman Moore returns to John Winthrop, and examines, first the providential interpretations the colonists put on their experiences, and then the rather different way in which the American venture was seen from the perspective of England. Patrick Collinson casts a quizzical eye over one of Tyacke's pioneering studies in microcosm, the further reaches of Puritan naming practices. Thomas Cogswell's contribution tackles that much neglected topic, the enforcement of the laws against Catholicism, providing a fascinating moral tale of the rapid rise of Thomas Felton, whose ruthless exploitation of commissions to find recusants' lands and goods made him, and Elizabeth, considerably richer, before James's more tolerant approach led to his equally precipitate fall. In the final two chapters, Bill Sheils traces the fate of two northern Presbyterian preachers, John Shawe and Edward Bowles, as they negotiated their ways through the civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration, whilst Kenneth Fincham provides a vignette of the impact of Puritan and Laudian sensibilities on the interior of a single Norwich church, St George Tombland, across a most interesting time-span, from the 1630s through to the 1680s.

Though differing in quality, the range of the subject-matter of the contributions to this Festschrift, and their ability repeatedly and meaningfully to cite Nicholas Tyacke, give a clear indication of the extent of his influence on contemporary early modern religious history. And, to offset the thought that a Festschrift might somehow mark the end of his academic career, we can still look forward to another major contribution to early modern religious history in his forthcoming joint study with Ken Fincham on the altar in post-Reformation Protestantism.