Thomas Cranmer, seated in an Oxford cell before a plain wooden desk, weary from months of trial, interrogation, and imprisonment, tried to make sense of his life. Before him lay the speech he was to ...

The little-known, last-minute act of courage and faith. Thomas Cranmer is mostly remembered today for his wise and beautiful crafting of The Book of Common Prayer, one of the masterpieces of the ...

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On Mary I's ascendancy the Catholics returned to power. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester was released from the Tower and made Lord Chancellor. Mary I wanted reunion with Rome - 200 Protestants ...

When Henry VIII withdrew the English Church from its allegiance to Rome in 1534, no one knew whether the new national church would align with the Reformation then sweeping across Europe or, conversely ...

In anticipation of English prose after the Commonwealth, I had initially found the temptation to include Robert Hooke’s extraordinary Micrographia (1665) next in this sequence almost overwhelming.