ABSTRACT
Sin and salvation are ubiquitous words, concepts and preoccupations in the written and printed literature of early modern England. They are the bread and butter of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious discourse, and yet our familiarity with them has bred, if not contempt, then a conspicuous degree of neglect. Despite their centrality in the heated controversies unleashed by the advent of Protestantism, reformation historians have rarely brought them to the centre of the stage and placed them directly under the spotlight. They have largely left the task of dissecting reformed soteriology and morality to professional theologians.
