My research focuses on the Book of Homilies, the collection of official sermons published in the sixteenth century as part of the official program of religious reform in England. Throughout the early modern period, the Book of Homilies provided homiletical, doctrinal, ecclesiological, and devotional guidance for the Crown, the clergy, and the people of England. Theologians and literary scholars consider it one of the most important religious texts of the period. Historians, however, have largely neglected the Homilies. My research analyses how the Book of Homilies shaped the Church of England, English Protestant Culture, and the Protestant English state in the seventeenth century. I examine how the Crown, clergy, and laity received, interpreted, and negotiated this text as they continually defined and re-defined what it meant to be an English Protestant during this turbulent and formative period for the Church and the nation. This research is generously funded by the Wolfson Foundation and supervised by Peter Marshall, Mark Knights, and Beat Kümin.