Since the 1970s, the origins, course and consequences of the English Reformation have been the subject of lively, stimulating and often heated debate among scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pendulum of interpretation has swung wildly: from upbeat assessments of the enthusiastic embrace and swift spread of Protestant ideas towards ‘revisionist’ accounts of the haphazard development and patchy progress of a religious revolution imposed upon an unwilling populace by the Tudor state. Reacting vigorously against the inherited triumphalist narratives that have constrained our understanding of this past, early modernists have congratulated themselves for extricating the study of Reformation from the straitjacket of confessional history, even as, in various ways, their own work has served to perpetuate this.