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John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer. By Gary W. Jenkins. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History] (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company 2006. Pp. viii, 293. $99.95;£55.)
In this monograph Gary Jenkins successfully balances John Jewel's public persona-thirty-sixth Bishop of Salisbury and a staunch defender of the Elizabethan settlement-with his privately held theological views. While much of Jewel's published work suggests a model conforming prelate, "fully in support of his prince, and archbishop's actions" (p. 186), his copious correspondence with his friend and theological mentor Peter Martyr Vermigli reveals the bishop's private longings for purer reformed teaching on the lines of Bullinger's Zurich. Indeed, at the peak of his ecclesiastical career after his election to the see of Salisbury, Jewel confided to Martyr: 'O Zurich, Zurich, how much more often do I now think of you than ever I thought of England when I was in Zurich!" (p. 178). Jenkins presents a Janus figure, who "faced on the one side the life and duties of an English Protestant prelate; and on the other, that of a...