Richard Taverner earned his reputation mainly, though not exclusively, as a translator of work by the renowned European humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. While Erasmus generally distanced himself from the Lutheran-inspired Reformation, his work nevertheless was turned into moderate Protestant tracts by men such as Taverner. The translation of work written by decidedly Protestant Continental reformers, however, often went in the opposite direction: the work of men such as Wolfgang Capito, Erasmus Sarcerius, and John Calvin, all three translated by Taverner, was moderated for Henry VIII, who, though enjoying freedom from papal authority after the English Reformation of the 1530s, was still relatively conservative in matters of religion. The selection of at least some of these translation projects directly involved Taverner's patron and the king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, who was interested in producing treatises that supported the burgeoning Henrician church of the 1530s. Even those works...