Within a month of John Rainolds's death on 21 May 1607 the great Italian scholar Joseph Scaliger bemoaned the loss of not only a profoundly erudite scholar but also a towering pillar of the reformed churches. The Swiss-born English classical scholar and theologian Isaac Casaubon praised Rainolds as "the best and most-learned of men" and said that even before he came to England in 1610 he began taking English lessons "chiefly that he might read Rainolds's books, and those of other anglican writers." These are but two testimonials to the respect and admiration in which contemporaries held the man who was, perhaps, the greatest English scholar of the sixteenth century. Had he lived a century later, Rainolds would have undoubtedly left his mark on classical secular scholarship; but in the volatile context of the Elizabethan period Rainolds saw it as his calling to use his immense learning to further the cause...