This revised edition of MacCulloch's masterful, highly acclaimed Cranmer biography (Yale University Press, 1996) is welcome. It reminds us of this important figure whom MacCulloch portrays as “a major player in a European-wide revolution with a cosmopolitan outlook exceptional among his English contemporaries” (2). In the introduction to the first edition, MacCulloch indicates his perspective: “I do not seek to make Thomas Cranmer into either a hero or a villain” (7). He continues to say that “if there is bias in this narrative, it is sympathy for a man who was frequently confused and who confused others; and there is also admiration for the way in which he struggled to a final gesture of certainty in his last hour” (7).

The revisions in this edition are few. One is MacCulloch's identification of a 1547 sermon preached at Edward VI's coronation and attributed to Cranmer, as a seventeenth-century forgery. A second is the removal of a reference to Cranmer's diplomatic expedition to Spain in 1527. This had been based on an incorrect attribution of two Latin letters to Cranmer's later correspondent Johannes Dantiscus. But MacCulloch had “already done penance for this mistake” in 2007 (1).

Further understandings of the Reformation under the Tudors established in the last two decades have not altered the picture of Cranmer which MacCulloch earlier presented. Cranmer's key role in the English Reformation is clear. But MacCulloch argues that as architect of the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer's greatest contribution is “in the realm of language and of cultural identity” (630).