Boydell Press Cambridge Evangelicals and the English Reformation, c. 1520–1540 (Studies in Modern British Religious History)

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 the early evangelical reformers clustered at the University of Cambridge in the 1520s and 30s as a lens through which to reconsider key aspects of early English Reformation history as well as the intellectual and theological foundations of the English state church. It argues that England's earliest evangelicals were not fundamentally driven by Lutheran doctrines of salvation, justification, or the Eucharist. Instead, their core ideological commitments centred on the role of human authorities, above all church and state leaders, relative to the Bible, in determining religious affairs. The slain reformers, so often later commemorated by English Protestants as 'founders' of their church, therefore 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. Cambridge Evangelicals and the English Reformation 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.