Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2014
This article aims to provide an introductory historical sketch of the origins of the Church of England as a background for canon law in the present-day Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church. Written by a specialist for non-specialists, it summarises the widely held view among ecclesiastical historians that if the Church of England could ever be said to have had a ‘normative’ period, it is not to be found in its formative years in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and that, in particular, the origins of the Church of England and of what we now call ‘Anglicanism’ are not the same thing.
2 See Lake, P, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp 4–6Google Scholar, 159–160; P Lake and M Questier, ‘Introduction’, and Tyacke, N, ‘Lancelot Andrewes and the myth of Anglicanism’, in Lake, P and Questier, M (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp ix–xxGoogle Scholar and 5–33.
3 Cummings, B (ed), The Book of Common Prayer: the texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford, 2011), pp 4–5Google Scholar.
4 MacCulloch, D, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), pp 504–512Google Scholar.
5 Marcus, L, Mueller, J and Rose, M (eds), Elizabeth I: collected works (Chicago, IL, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p 178.
6 Collinson, P, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), p 94Google Scholar.
7 Marcus et al, Elizabeth I, p 181.
8 McCullough, P (ed), Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford, 2005), pp 108–121Google Scholar, 353–365.
9 Ibid, pp 82–99, 331–334.