The year 1998 marks the 250th anniversary of the death of Isaac Watts, who is thus a figure whose life falls midway between Tyndale and ourselves. Although best remembered now as a hymn-writer, in his lifetime he was highly regarded as a Lockean philosopher, educationalist, and writer on the intellectual life. About title-pages, he once observed:

 
        If we would form a judgment of a book which we have not
        seen before, the first thing that offers is the title-page,
        and we may sometimes guess a little at the import and design
        of a book thereby.

In judging books, Watts observes that while we tend to look favourably on books that agree with our principles, ‘if the author be of different sentiments, and espouses contrary principles, we can find neither wit nor reason, good sense, nor good language in it’. This may sound an apt description of the initial response of the English authorities to Tyndale's New Testament, but it is anachronistic unless we weigh also the burdens of pastoral responsibility which lay upon episcopal shoulders and which here are explored by Andrew Chibi, in a thorough examination of the background of the Henrican bishops, and by Margaret Clark, who looks at the impression Cuthbert Tunstall made on those around him. Nevertheless, it is likely that the heretical associations of vernacular English bibles meant that a certain readership was impervious to the new books's merits. Watts warned that such preconceptions resulted in books not being judged by ‘the justness of their sentiment, the beauty of their manner, [or] the force of their expression’. These are precisely the kinds of terms which have attached themselves to the Authorised Version. The extent to which Tyndale's translation survived into the Authorised Version is here estimated, by John Nielson and Royal Skousen, with far greater sophistication than ever before.

Whether the religious tradition in which vernacular scripture translation stood should be labelled ‘heretical’ was of course contested. John Stacey looks at what might be called its fountainhead in John Wyclif's homiletical theology. Bill Cooper describes an important document in Tyndale's appropriation of that tradition, the second significant discovery recorded in this volume, since it appears to be in Tyndale's own hand. As the disorderly conflicts of the early Reformation began to harden into new orthodoxies there was created a demand for new histories. Tom Betteridge looks at the Marian view of the reign of Henry VIII, and Tom Freeman at the construction of the Edwardian and Elizabethan account of the reign of King John.

For Watts, one of the purposes of history was to bring to mind the ‘distressful and desolating events which have in all ages attended the mistakes of politicians’. Orlaith O'Sullivan resurrects George Joye's account of how, confronted by episcopal inquisition, his nerve cracked and he fled abroad. She also looks at four individual women in conditions of religious persecution and how their gender could be both used against them to their destruction and employed by them for their preservation.

These reverberations of wider cultural changes are picked up in the two concluding articles. Jason Scott-Warren discusses literary production, publication, and court patronage in late Elizabethan England, and Andrew Hadfield the apocalyptic and anti-Spanish contexts of English colonization.

This is the first number of REFORMATION to include a substantial book review section. A distinguished list of reviewers has been assembled with great energy and efficiency by Andrew Hadfield of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, and the books reviewed here reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of this journal.

In the production of this volume, I am very much in the debt of David Daniell and Priscilla Frost in England, and at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, of Richard Duerden and, most importantly, Linda Hunter Adams and her students at the Humanities Publications Center, where the copy-editing and design were carried out. We are also pleased again to thank the Van Kampen Foundation, formerly The Scriptorium, for its continued generous support.

Finally, it is with sadness that we record the death of Michael Weitzman, who spoke at the first Tyndale International Conference and who contributed an article on Tyndale's translation of the Old Testament to the first number of this journal. Isaac Watts was particularly concerned to extol that scholar who might ‘ by labour, diligence, study, and prayer, with the best use of his reasoning powers, find out the proper solution of those knots and perplexities [in difficult texts and paragraphs of the Bible] which have hitherto been unsolved....’ Michael Weitzman was indeed such a scholar.

— Andrew Hope

(Quotations are from Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind (London: Walker et al., 1819), pp. 51, 53, 223, and 9.)