Thomas Cranmer A Life

EB: Yale University Press. Very Good. 1998. Paperback. Trade PB. 8vo. Published by Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. 1998. 704 pgs. Wrappers lightly worn with some light shelf-wear to the extremities present. Book is free of ownership marks. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the archbishop of Canterbury who guided England through the early Reformation? And Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography of him for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere. Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book. EB; 9.1 X 6.3 X 1.8 inches; 704 pages .