In Chaucer's portrait of the monk, we are given the image of a lord prior who took the “modern way,” especially in regard to monastic rules.

The rule of good Saint Benet or Saint Maur,

As old and strict, he tended to ignore;…

he let go by the things of yesterday,

and took the modern world's more spacious way…

Must he toil, as Austin bade and till the very soil?

Was he to leave the world upon the shelf?

Let Austin have his labour to himself.

Historians and biographers of George Abbot traditionally have viewed King James's appointment of the forty-eight year old bishop of London to the archbishopric of Canterbury on 4 March 1611 as both unexpected and unpopular. Although Fuller conceived him to be “of a more fatherly presence than those who might have been his fathers for age in the Church of England,” there was a significant body of opinion that held he was unfit for such an important post for two major reasons.

When William Ames (1576–1633) chose not to wear a surplice while preaching at a Cambridge University chapel, he embodied the Reformation spirit of defiance toward the symbols of ecclesiastical and educational authority. This action and subsequent signs of dissent within the Church of England earned Ames a life of exile in the Netherlands. Yet in serving as a professor at the Universities of Leiden and Franeker, the Puritan scholar perfected methods of instruction that would establish him as an authority among those similarly committed to learning the revealed will of God and investigating the structure and operation of the human mind.

As befits its importance in the nineteenth century, British nonconformity has attracted a lot of attention from scholars. Eminent personalities and denominational development or doctrine tend to dominate the earlier writing, while another long-established genre which is still producing fruitful work has been the analysis of the impact of nonconformity in society at large, for example in national or local politics, trade unionism, and education.

The number of those who remember hearing the voice of Father Charles E. Coughlin on the radio on Sunday afternoons in the 1930s and 1940s is dwindling. Those who do recall generally respond with adulation or disdain. Coughlin, like his contemporary Franklin D. Roosevelt, was either loved and admired or held in a kind of contempt. In the past, writers reflected on Coughlin chiefly from a political or socio-cultural point of view. My goal in researching “the radio priest,” however, has been to explore the theological roots of the anti-Semitism (more properly anti-Judaism), which became a dominant note in his speeches and writings, particularly in the year 1938 and thereafter.