"This book has been in gestation since 1972. When I began studying history professionally, I had a question on my mind: I wanted to understand the relationship between belief and behavior. My lab was the Reformation, in which people openly talked about what they believed and formally altered those beliefs, marking the beginning of early modern culture. Since I began, my work has explored various approaches to this question, and this work is a synthesis of my varied inquests into Elizabethan society"--