A Protestant Vision

Historians have often cited William Harrison, a prominent Elizabethan thinker, because his outlook captures a rigorous strain of Protestantism. That strain took reformed doctrine from the Continent and fitted it to the conditions of Tudor England. Harrison received a university education and held Protestant convictions, and this study shows how those convictions formed a unified view of the world anchored in a particular reading of history.

Harrison brought that view to bear on several concerns of his day: completing the reform of the church, improving social life, correcting economic inequality, reshaping everyday conduct, and checking the risky theorizing then emerging in natural philosophy. The author's account rests on a manuscript that had never been studied before, Harrison's account of world history. Because it survives, the reader can see in unusual detail how a single individual made sense of the world.