We have sought to gather together friends, colleagues and former students from a wide range of institutions in putting together this tribute to Patrick Collinson on his sixty-fifth birthday. For his academic career has been peripatetic: London, Kent, Sydney, Sheffield and Cambridge are all represented here. We have adopted a broad theme. This reflects the breadth of Patrick's interests and scholarship in the early modern period and it has enabled contributors from different areas of the field to write illuminatingly about topics within their specialist expertise. The flavour of the volume, we believe, represents an appropriate tribute to an historian whose works have enriched our understanding of the period over thirty years. Patrick's own mind has ever been on the move. His supervisor, Sir John Neale, commented at the time of the presentation of Patrick's prodigious PhD thesis on Elizabethan Puritanism in 1957: ‘Collinson, I like to think of you spending the rest of your life on this subject.’ In one sense he has done this but in another this is very much less than what he has done. For Patrick's later writings show his receptivity to findings from the related disciplines of anthropology, sociology and literature and his unremitting search into the social and cultural implications of religion and religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.