The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a remarkably rapid evolution in the aims and teachings of church history, both in Protestant and Catholic areas of Europe. That the early sixteenth century was obsessed with church history is hardly surprising. The history of the church was one of the most potent elements in controversial literature while the ideological struggle which we label ‘Protestant’ and ‘Counter-Reformation’ took shape.

In many ways, the interest in the history of the church was more vehement in Protestant areas than in Roman Catholic ones, and for compelling reasons. The Protestant had to investigate the history of the church he was criticising, had to defend his rebellion, so to speak. Put in other words, he was concerned to demonstrate that he was not really a rebel; that his church was the true church, near, very near, to the primitive church; and above all that his hierarchy was every bit as authentic as the Roman one (that is, orders in the Lutheran or Anglican Church were derived from the apostles). This was to remain an Anglican preoccupation down to the nineteenth century, when Bishop Stubbs produced massive evidence on the episcopal succession in his Registrum sacrum Anglicanum. It can indeed be traced back to some of the Tudor historians, and not least to the great collector and patron Matthew Parker, who compiled an account of the British church and its privileges together with a list of the seventy archbishops, a book which was privately printed in 1572.