ABSTRACT
Recent revisionist work on sixteenth-century Protestantism has revealed the inadequacy of a strictly word-centered religion to convince a largely illiterate populace. Protestantism did challenge the entrenched interests of a Catholic elite; it opened up exhilarating new professional opportunities for a theologically sophisticated university class as well. This chapter analyzes the diagrammatic figures in a Protestant teaching text, the 1600 edition of William Perkins's A Golden Chaine: OR, the Description of Theology. It provides an overview of Tudor–Stuart history's recent malaise on the topic of Calvinism. Raised upon revisionist disenchantment with an English Reformation as described by A. G. Dickens, convinced that only Laudians had "style", recent histories of post-Reformation England have rather inattentively adopted Patrick Collinson's suggestive comments on Puritan iconophobia, expanding them to fit a stereotype of Calvinism. This leads to an inevitable paradox. People treat the seventeenth-century "Calvinist consensus" as a commonplace, while dismissing sixteenth-century Calvinism itself as doctrinally offputting, culturally anorexic, and socially resistable.
