John Jewel is known to modern scholars as the first apologist of the Church of England, a reputation based on his Apologia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1562), which established the basis for the Elizabethan settlement--the middle way between the competing demands of a Roman Catholic Church from which England sought to disentangle itself and an emerging Puritanism whose ecclesiastical and theological reforms England soon came to oppose. Jewel was better known to his contemporaries, and certainly to Queen Elizabeth I, as the most accomplished and distinguished Christian orator in England. His best-known works--the Oratio contra Rhetoricam (Oration against Rhetoric, delivered circa 1548), The Challenge Sermon (1560), and the Apologia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ (1562)--and his life, specifically his involvement in establishing the doctrine of the Church of England, his preaching, and his public exchanges with Thomas Harding, provide a vivid and comprehensive portrait of a mid-sixteenth-century English theologian-rhetorician. Taken together, the...