This is Patrick Collinson's last book. It appears forty-six years after his vastly influential The Elizabethan Puritan movement, fifty-six years after the legendary 1,300 page-long doctoral thesis upon which that book was based, and two years after his death at the age of eighty-two. It has been seen through the press by Alex Walsham and John Morrill, who provide a thoughtful preface in which they note Collinson's description of working on the book manuscript as ‘a kind of mental therapy’ (p. ix). The therapy was evidently of mixed character. On the one hand, Collinson clearly loathes Richard Bancroft, despising his ‘tabloid’ (p. 93) habits of mind, in which he worked tirelessly against a Puritan conspiracy that consumed and obsessed him: ‘It was his Moby Dick’ (p. 7). But if Captain Ahab's mania led him to a watery grave, Bancroft's would ultimately deposit him safely on reasonably dry land, in Lambeth Palace as the seventy-third archbishop of Canterbury. Not since Hugh Trevor-Roper's study of Archbishop Laud can there have been a biographical account of an English prelate in which the author is so at odds with his subject. Collinson ends his account by musing ‘Was there any religion in the man at all?’, emphasising Bancroft's religiously conservative upbringing in Lancashire, and ongoing connections with Catholics: he was a figure ‘en arrière de la lettre’ (pp. 222–3). On the other hand, though, Collinson evidently found enduring intellectual interest in tracing the character and significance of English anti-popery, a theme to which he made a number of foundational contributions, all based on the contention that ‘Anti-Puritanism was antecedent to the nickname of Puritan’ (p. 2). Pursuit of the theme certainly trumps any sustained biographical attempt: Bancroft moves in and out of focus, often remaining in the background for long periods during substantial discussions of the Martin Marprelate and other late Elizabethan controversies. The book's coverage is focused primarily on the 1580s and 1590s, ending with Bancroft's part at the Hampton Court Conference and his elevation to the see of Canterbury in 1604 (rather than his death in 1610). The scholarly apparatus of the text was unfinished at the time of Collinson's death, leaving Walsham and Morrill a good deal of work, touchingly undertaken ‘with the greatest respect, pride and love’ (p. ix). This yields an inevitably uneven final work, but one nevertheless shot through with Collinson's characteristic mix of powerful insights and vigorous prose. If the period of Grindal's primacy was ‘a kind of evangelical Prague Spring’ (p. 40), readers of this book will derive great insight into the authoritarian aftermath.