Professor Patrick Collinson, religious historian, 82
His first major monograph, published as The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), transformed the way historians conceived the nature and role of puritanism; meanwhile, his essay The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I (1987) instigated a proliferation of research into, and lively debate about, quasi-republican aspects of Tudor and Stuart England.
In a field of history overpopulated with warring prima donnas, Collinson managed the rare achievement of having a profound impact on the debate while managing not to fall out with others working in the same area. This is because he always combined rigorous scholastic methods with academic integrity and intellectual generosity.
For centuries, the history of the English Reformation was written for a Protestant audience. The notion that Protestantism was a friend to progress against reaction, and to civil and parliamentary liberty against tyranny, did not make for impartial history. It was Collinson, more than anyone, who moved away from this approach and analysed Protestantism like any other religion. He moved away, too, from the Nonconformist tradition which, by confusing Tudor and early-Stuart Protestantism with the Dissenting tradition that replaced it, missed the dynamism of the earlier movement....