Reconsiders key aspects of the early English Reformation and the intellectual, theological and social foundations of the English state church.


Cambridge Evangelicals and the English Reformation uses a crucial group of early evangelical reformers clustered at the University of Cambridge during the outbreak of the English Reformation as a lens through which to reconsider key aspects of early English Reformation history and the intellectual, theological and social foundations of the English state church. The book argues that England's earliest evangelicals (Protestants) were not driven fundamentally by Lutheran doctrines of salvation or the Eucharist. Instead, their core ideological differences concerned not justification, but rather the role of human authorities, above all church and state leaders, in determining religious affairs and the slain reformists so often later commemorated by English Protestants as 'founders' of their church in fact diverged in crucial ways from its central tenets. By recasting the core of early English evangelical theology, in at least some circles, to exclude Lutheran conceptions of justification by faith, this analysis also allows a reinterpretation of the understanding of justification expressed in official Henrician religious policy, particularly the Ten Articles of 1536, previously often dismissed as self-referentially incoherent. The book also reevaluates key questions about the early English Reformation more broadly, including early sixteenth-century English approaches to the translation of scripture, the networks by which evangelical ideas entered and spread within England and the nature of religious conversion in this period, integrating social, political, intellectual and theological history, as well as making a significant contribution to the history of the University of Cambridge.