Patrick Collinson

Patrick Collinson CBE (10 August 1929 – 28 September 2011) was an English historian, known as an authority on the Elizabethan era. His most influential work has been about Elizabethan Puritanism. He was Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996.

Life

He was born in Ipswich, the son of William Cecil Collinson and Belle Hay Patrick. He was educated at King's School, Ely, and Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1949 to 1952.

Collinson authored his 1957 doctorate on Elizabethan Puritanism under J. E. Neale, and was a lecturer at the University of Khartoum and King's College London. He was professor at the University of Sydney in 1969, then at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Sheffield.

His 1967 monograph, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, had a great impact on historians' understanding of the movement. The work showed Puritanism to be a significant force within the Elizabethan Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals. By the time of his retirement in 1996, he was one of the doyens of English Reformation history. His short summation of the period, The Reformation, was published in 2003.

Collinson's work laid the foundations, in many ways, for what historians of the English Reformation currently term the 'Calvinist Consensus' in the latter decades of the sixteenth and reign of James I/VI. As such, the belief Puritanism was anything but religiously radical in relation to English, and indeed British, culture stands as one of his great achievements as an historian.

Professor Patrick Collinson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in July 2000.^{[citation needed]} In 2011, Boydell Press published Collinson's memoir, The History of a History Man Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance. The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson as part of its Church of England Record Society Series. Collinson was the founding President of the society.

Works

• Letters of Thomas Wood, Puritan, 1566–1577 (ed.) (1960)
• The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967)
• Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (1979)
• The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (1982)
• The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988)
• Elizabethan Essays (1994)
• Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Sixteenth Century (editor) (2002)
• Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge: 1502–1649 (2003)
• Elizabethans (2003)
• The Reformation (2003)
• Elizabeth I (Very Interesting People Series, 2007)
• From Cranmer to Sancroft (2007)

Further reading

• Anthony Fletcher, Peter Roberts (editors) (2006), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson
• Patrick Collinson, The History of a History Man Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance. The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84383-627-8.

External links

• Interview
• Obituary in The Telegraph