John Colet by John B. Gleason offers the first comprehensive scholarly biography of the early Tudor theologian, reformer, and founder of St. Paul's School. Long overshadowed by Erasmus and Thomas More, Colet emerges here as a central figure in the intellectual and religious life of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England. Drawing on Colet's manuscripts, sermons, and exegetical writings, as well as the shifting historiographical traditions that shaped his posthumous reputation, Gleason reconstructs the career of a thinker whose blend of humanist learning, Pauline theology, and cautious reformism complicates both Protestant and Catholic narratives of the English Reformation.
Moving beyond the Victorian image of Colet as a proto-Protestant hero, Gleason situates him in the contexts of mercantile London, Oxford and Cambridge scholarship, and the politics of Henry VII's and Henry VIII's courts. The book explores his exegetical method, his theology of the sacraments, his educational vision for St. Paul's School, and his role in policing heresy and guiding reform from within the church. At once sympathetic and critical, John Colet reveals a figure at the crossroads of medieval and Renaissance intellectual cultures, whose writings anticipate modern biblical criticism while remaining embedded in the conservative hierarchies of his own day.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.