The Introduction is in three parts. The first introduces the object of study and the sources and methodology used to study it and puts the topic in its historiographical context. The second locates it in terms of the religio-political developments of the period between the 1590s and the 1620s. The third addresses the immediate political and polemical circumstances in which Laudianism rose to prominence and then power in the mid- to late 1620s, and then identifies the 1630 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons as the movement’s key foundational text or mission statement.

Chapter 17 deals with the continuing development of the doctrine of justification in England during the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, as seen in the writings of the leading Anglican thinkers generally referred to as ‘the Caroline Divines’. Although Protestant approaches to justification stressed that this was to be seen as a graceful transformation effected by God, the English social and cultural context led to emphasis being placed on the link between justification and appropriate moral behaviour. Many later Caroline divines interpreted justification in an Augustinian sense as a ‘making righteous’, and hence as securing a theological framework for moral propriety. It is possible that the new directions within the Anglican theology of justification may have arisen as a conscious reaction against the Puritanism of the Westminster divines, which became the position of the Puritan religious establishment following the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the Puritan commonwealth.