Annal:1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
Thomas Cranmer: A Life
- 1996 JT Black-Biography winner
- 1996 Whitbread-Biography winner
- Score: 20.46
Thomas Cranmer was the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. He was the Archbishop who guided England through the early Reformation, and Henry VIII through the minefields of divorce. This is the first major biography for more than three decades, and the first for a century to exploit rich new manuscript sources in Britain and elsewhere.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Cranmer from his east-midland roots to early Tudor Cambridge, into the household of the family of Anne Boleyn, and through the political labyrinth of the Henrician court. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer navigated the church through the king’s vacillations and finalized two successive English Prayer Books. MacCulloch skillfully reconstruction the crises which Cranmer negotiated, from his compromising association with three of Henry’s divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as Queen, to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In…
