John Field was one of the most brilliant activists and propagandists of Elizabethan England. He directed all his skills toward a single cause, the reformation of the English church. Field is little known because his work was clandestine and the movement he led was suppressed. But as the leader of the London conference of nonconforming ministers, he became the organizing secretary of the movement; he was, as Patrick Collinson has called him, "the Lenin of Elizabethan Puritanism." The Puritan attack on vestments, ceremonies, and the form of church organization may now seem superficial, but it entailed radical revision of the assumptions behind Elizabethan government and society; its challenges to authority shook the politics of both church and state. One side of the struggle between Puritans and conformists in the English church was public and ideological: the Puritans published and preached their story and arguments in the streets. Another...