Nicholas Tyacke, in whose honor these essays were written, is deservedly well-known for having recast the religious and ecclesiastical struggle of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Traditionally interpreted as the result of the rise of a militant puritanism, it came to be seen, following several important publications by Tyacke in the 1970s and 1980s, as the result of a militant anti-Calvinism spearheaded by Richard Neile and William Laud, bishops in the established Church. They and their followers, with the support of King Charles I, worked to overthrow a Calvinist consensus in England and thereby provoked an opposition that triumphed in the civil wars. Tyacke also recognized that radical tendencies associated with puritanism affected the struggle over several decades.

This collection of essays has a greater unity than most books of its type because many of the contributors pursue issues Tyacke's own work has helped to illuminate. Peter Lake provides an indispensable account of both the revisionist views of Tyacke and the continuing debate about the theological orientation of the Church of England in the era under review. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his essay, “The Latitude of the Church of England,” argues that Strassburg and Zurich were more important than Geneva in the Church of England's development in the mid- to late sixteenth century. The English Church, he argues, was rightly considered a member of the family of Reformed churches, though it had a distinctive polity, liturgy, and—especially in cathedrals and the Chapel Royal—musical tradition. Lake, in his essay “Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” extends the argument of an earlier essay on anti-popery to show that the term “puritan” was a label often used to discredit one's enemies, but that polemical works can nevertheless be valuable sources of information. Brett Usher treats the Elizabethan puritan movement from the perspective of its financial backing and early organizational structure, producing evidence from wills to show that the movement was under way from the early 1570s. Patrick Collinson, who has frequently been associated with Tyacke in developing the view that a Calvinist consensus emerged in England in the early seventeenth century, investigates the origin of baptismal names describing spiritual qualities. He finds Dudley Fenner, a nonconformist minister who left several influential books after his premature death in 1587, to be a likely source of the practice. Paul Seaver deals with the relations between puritan preachers and their patrons—the laymen who had the right of appointment to clerical livings—in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He cites dedications to published sermons and manuscript letters to show that lay initiative was decisive in the spread of puritan ideas and values. In a fascinating analysis, Susan Hardman Moore traces the origins of the “New England Way” of church polity back to the experiences of the New World settlers while they were still in England. She also shows that this model of congregationalism was influential in England in the discussions and practices of the 1640s and 1650s. Surprisingly, only Anthony Milton deals in detail with the theology of the anti-Calvinists or English Arminians. His essay is provocatively titled “‘Anglicanism’ by Stealth: The Career and Influence of John Overall.” The essay does much to make the elusive Overall better known and shows that Overall's thought, like Richard Hooker's, anticipated the later theological and liturgical emphases of Anglicanism. Milton also argues that Overall anticipated the ideas of Neile and Laud and that he may have been as important as Lancelot Andrewes in the emergence of English Arminianism. Richard Cust shows that Charles I, the patron of the Arminians, was as deeply influenced by providentialism, the view that God acts directly in human affairs and holds human beings accountable for their actions, as committed puritans were.

Other essays are more obliquely related to Tyacke's work, though they all deal with the religious and political history of the era. In an ambitious and widely ranging essay, Keith Thomas analyzes the wholesale destruction of medieval ecclesiastical art in the course of the English Reformation and its aftermath. He successfully explains the hostility of many Protestants to the representation of saints or the deity by showing that they felt that such visible, tangible figures had too often been seen as invested with spiritual power. He argues that the antiquarian movement and the activities of individual collectors led to a new appreciation of aesthetic achievement. As a result there ensued “a plainer style and the increasing divorce of art from religion” (38). Thomas S. Freeman, in “Joan of Contention: The Myth of the Female Pope in Early Modern England,” shows definitively that the story of a female pope in the eighth century whose name was Joan dates only from the mid-thirteenth century. English Protestant writers used the story to attempt to discredit the papacy. The Laudians suppressed the myth because it threatened the English Church's own claims to an episcopal succession, so closely linked was its succession to that of Rome. Thomas Cogswell provides an exciting detective story about the anti-Catholic views of key members of the family of John Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham. A remonstrance passed by parliament against the Duke of Buckingham condemned him for his conduct of wars on the continent, his support of Arminians, and his tolerant attitude toward Catholics, and this seems to have given Felton grounds to assassinate the duke. Finally, William Sheils and Kenneth Fincham raise issues about how local communities coped with rapidly changing religious and political circumstances in the civil wars, the Interregnum, and the Restoration. Sheils's essay, “John Shawe and Edward Bowles: Civic Preachers at Peace and War,” shows, through the experiences of two prominent puritan ministers in York, the expectations and frustration of those who expected godly rule to follow the defeat of the royalists on the battlefield. Fincham's essay, “Material Evidence: The Religious Legacy of the Interregnum at St. George Tombland, Norwich,” reconstructs in remarkable detail the bitter dissension within a parish in Norwich in 1673–1680 over a gallery built at the east end of the church and a pulpit centrally located in the chancel. These features were the result of changes made when St. George's was an Independent congregation in the late 1640s. The gallery was finally removed in 1680, thereby giving greater prominence to the altar, but there was widespread opposition on the part of parishioners. The story neatly illustrates the continuing religious divisions in the seventeenth century.

Fincham comments that the 1640s and 1650s remain “the Berlin Wall of seventeenth-century England” (240), meaning that a new era and culture emerged, albeit with a good many unresolved tensions and conflicts from the past. Anyone who wants to know the state of scholarship concerning some of the dramatic changes that took place would do well to read this volume.