As his early biographers and eulogizers (including George Herbert and John Milton) attest, Lancelot Andrewes, the grave and erudite Jacobean churchman, came to exemplify the saintly scholar-bishop, still a potent cultural ideal in the first half of the seventeenth century. Usually treated as one of the early leaders of the anti-Calvinist reaction--the spiritual father, as it were, of Anglo-Catholicism--he was also an eminent scholar, one of the few English scholars of his day to achieve a European reputation. He is among the foremost English representatives of the late-Renaissance respublica litterarum, the international community of scholars, jurists, and churchmen engaged in advanced humanist scholarship. His subsequent reputation, however, largely rests upon the great festival sermons he preached for more than two decades to the Jacobean court, sermons characterized by a dense, compact prose and a deep reverence before the central mysteries of Christian devotion.

Lancelot Andrewes was born in...