Patrick Collinson

Patrick "Pat" Collinson CBE (10 August 1929 in Ipswich – 28 September 2011) was an English historian, known as a writer on the Elizabethan era, particularly Elizabethan Puritanism. He was emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He once described himself as “an early modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

Collinson was born in Ipswich, the son of William Cecil Collinson and Belle Hay Patrick. His father came from a Yorkshire Quaker family, and both Patrick's parents were Christian missionaries. He later wrote that his childhood home was "an evangelical hothouse where the second coming was expected daily". Before he was 20, he was baptised at Bethesda Chapel in Ipswich.

After a short spell at Goudhurst School for Boys and Huntingdon Grammar School, Collinson was educated at King's School, Ely, and Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1949 to 1952. He was also trained as a radar mechanic during his national service in the RAF. He became a postgraduate student at the University of London in 1952 under the supervision of the Tudor historian J. E. Neale, who handed him some notes on East Anglian Puritanism; in 1957 Collinson completed his doctorate on Elizabethan Puritanism, its 1,200-page size causing the administration to impose a word limit on future dissertations; it was published in 1967 as The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, which showed Puritanism to be a significant force within the Elizabethan Anglican Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals, becoming a standard work.

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