Every book that is published on early modern religious thought serves to deplete the range of titles available to later historians, and it is with little surprise that I find myself duplicating the title of Florence Higham's 1962 study of the same period. The motives behind our two books, however, are somewhat different. Ms Higham's study of the period was written, she explained, in order to describe the Anglican Church's struggles to retain its ‘via media’, and ‘the emergence of Anglicanism as a living way’. In the years since Ms Higham's work, historians have questioned the existence of an ideologically coherent, unitary and stable ‘Anglicanism’, distinctive of the English Church and dedicated to a self-consciously achieved golden mean between Rome and Geneva, which could be read back into the Tudor and early Stuart Church. Notions of a definitively Anglican ‘via media’ have proved hard to find in the Tudor Church, whose orientation towards the Protestantism of the continent was more pronounced than later Anglicans might have wished.

In addition to their aversion to the anachronistic use of the term ‘Anglican’, with the allied assumption of the existence of a stable Anglican ‘essence’, Tudor historians have emphasized that Anglicanism's obverse – ‘puritanism’ – cannot be used to explain the religious divisions of the period as straightforwardly as past historians have tended to employ it.