The 1590s present the historian of the Elizabethan church with a professional problem. The decade lies in a kind of double rain shadow. On the far side loom the mountainously momentous 1580s, when militant puritanism briefly threatened ecclesiastical revolution, in part a response to the apparently extreme danger posed by an equally vigorous Catholic revival. Two deeply antithetical, intensely politicized religious fanaticisms confronted a hardline archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, backed up by a queen impersonating a rock, Semper Eadem. This gives the historian of the mainstream with an instinct for narrative plenty to write about. On the other side of the rain shadow extend the early years of the next century and of the new dynasty, which for a time, and especially at the Hampton Court Conference, brought a large Scottish question mark to bear on the English ecclesiastical polity, one which Dr Wormald will clarify elsewhere in this volume. This too makes a story. By comparison, the intervening nineties were strangely uneventful.

To be sure, uneventfulness and the ordinariness of conformity throw down a challenge to which historians of religion should not be afraid to respond. One recalls the poet Clough and his image of the silent main, flooding in ‘far back through creeks and inlets’. In those creeks and inlets this was a decade of ecclesiastical growth and improvement: a rising proportion of candidates for ordination who held university degrees, more preachers than ever before.