Both the Papists and the Puritans in Elizabethan England have received a great deal of attention from historians, but for the most part the two groups have been considered in isolation from each other and treated as though they had little in common except, perhaps, hostility to the Elizabethan religious settlement.   (Preface)

Under Henry VII and during the first half of the reign of Henry VIII all Englishmen were required to be members of the Church of Rome.   (Chapter 1)