Patrick Collinson

Patrick Collinson, who died in 2011, was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and the author of many books on the English Reformation, including The Elizabethan Puritan Movement and The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625.

Letter

Scarisbrick’s Bomb

20 December 1984

SIR: According to Peter Gwyn (LRB, 20 December 1984), J.J. Scarisbrick’s The Reformation and the English People is ‘good, perhaps very good’ because it was written ‘for the simple, old-fashioned reason that its author was passionately interested in imparting his views’. So I believe (writing on the same subject as Professor Scarisbrick) was Abbot Gasquet and one wonders why anybody has bothered...
Letter

Lives of Sidney

30 March 2000

Patrick Collinson writes: The moral would seem to be, stick to your last. Dr Duncan-Jones has had little difficulty in establishing that Sidney is not my last. We have been introduced, of course, but Dr Duncan-Jones, an authority, has had the advantage, in a manner of speaking, of living with this fascinating person for more than thirty years. If I were to make such egregious errors in writing about,...
Letter

The Cowbells of Kitale

5 June 2003

S. Daniel (Letters, 10 July) writes that no children in Kenya are now ‘too poor’ to go to school, and that my article reflects conditions before President Moi Kibaki came to power. He is partly correct, although the children of whom I wrote were (in 1997) unable to go to school not for lack of money to pay fees but because they could not afford uniforms. And in Kenya, as in many parts of the so-called...
Letter

Memories of Khrushchev

21 August 2003

I was standing in Downing Street in 1956 when Bulganin and Khrushchev were in Number 10. Harold Macmillan sprinted past on his way to Number 11. Then the door of Number 10 opened and B. and K. came out with Eden. I heard no boos, but someone at the back of the crowd called out loudly: ‘Tovarich! Tovarich!’ Khrushchev looked pleased and gave a little wave. Then we all went our several ways, Eden...
Letter

Was Will a papist?

20 January 2005

In judging the document supposedly discovered in the roof space of Shakespeare’s father’s house in Henley Street in 1757 ‘too good to be true’, Colin Burrow joins the ranks of those who reject the notion of Shakespeare’s Catholicism (LRB, 20 January). I do not claim that Shakespeare was a papist. On the contrary, his religion, along with much else about the man rather than his work, remains...

Pieces about Patrick Collinson in the LRB

Protestant Country

George Bernard, 14 June 1990

Henry VIII’s jurisidictional quarrel with the Papacy was not resolved, and its consequences are with us still. In Henry’s eyes the dispute was one of authority, not doctrine, but...

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Puritan Neuroses

Blair Worden, 19 April 1984

If the directions taken by historical research are indicative of a nation’s broader preoccupations, then we may have to prepare ourselves for a religious revival of some magnitude....

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Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on...

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