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9781843836537

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Fifty years ago as I began doctoral research on Elizabethan government, virtually the first original sources that my supervisor directed me to were the Acts of the Privy Council: an unrivalled bird's-eye view of Elizabethan England through the letters and orders written by those leading government around the monarch. I nevertheless became aware that in the 1580s there was a sad gap in the sequence of books, and I lamented it, looking in vain for further elements in a particular local crisis in which of course the Privy Council had intervened. I thought that we would never fill this silence, but now, astonishingly, David Crankshaw has found one of the original register-books of the 'Acts', bizarrely far from home and now in the national library of Spain. It startlingly illuminates the English Privy Council's multifarious work. His exploration of how the volume travelled from Whitehall across the seas to its present home is just one example of Crankshaw's exceptional scholarship and persistence in producing this monumental edition of such a miraculous survivor of fires, neglect and all the accidents that hamper the work of historical scholarship. There can be no-one more suited to the meticulous investigation and analysis which make these four volumes an outstanding addition to English history. Through the matrix of one crucial document, David Crankshaw in his framing commentary provides us with a unique panorama of late Tudor government. -- Diarmaid MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford

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Dr DAVID CRANKSHAW lectures on early modern religious history at King's College London. He has published on theecclesiastical patronage of the Elizabethan nobility, the Convocation of 1563 and St Paul's Cathedral.

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