Someone has recently written an essay on ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, a title easily misunderstood until one reads the first sentence: ‘The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen.’ The author is sure that on the contrary it did. But what was ‘it’? No small thing. As the major disjunction in the civilisation of a nation which lives by a virtuous myth of continuity, the scope of the Reformation is daunting, too vast a subject to be neatly packaged in the many books called ‘The English Reformation’, still less in a modest essay. ‘It’ redefined the law and the constitution, altered doctrine, liturgy, church architecture and religious aesthetics, affected morality, virtually invented (according to some) the modern family, redistributed landed property, adjusted the social structure which the land supported, modified economic and social policy (including interest rates and social security), and radically transformed both elite and popular culture. There were further implications for language, notions of time and space, perceptions of national identity and destiny. Unlike some more recent revolutions, not much of this was planned in advance. ‘The Reformation’ has been invented by historians, looking backwards. Some of the topics have been faithfully attended to in the literature: the great Henrician constitutional measures, the dissolution of the monasteries, Thomas Cranmer and his Book of Common Prayer. But there is no history of English Protestantism, not a single book claiming to deal with that subject, indeed no consensus that such a subject even exists.