Patrick Collinson CBE (10 August 1929 – 28 September 2011) was an English historian, known as an authority on the Elizabethan era. His most influential work has been about Elizabethan Puritanism. He was Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He died on 28 September 2011.
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He was born in Ipswich, the son of William Cecil Collinson and Belle Hay Patrick. He was educated at King's School, Ely, and Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1949 to 1952.
Professor Patrick Collinson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in July 2000.
Collinson authored his 1957 doctorate on Elizabethan Puritanism under J. E. Neale, and was a lecturer at the University of Khartoum and King's College London. He was professor at the University of Sydney in 1969, then at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Sheffield.[1]
His 1967 monograph, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, had a great impact on historians' understanding of the movement. The work showed Puritanism to be a significant force within the Elizabethan Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals.[2] By the time of his retirement in 1996, he was one of the doyens of English Reformation history. His short summation of the period, The Reformation, was published in 2003.
Collinson's work laid the foundations, in many ways, for what historians of the English Reformation currently term the 'Calvinist Consensus' in the latter decades of the sixteenth and reign of James I/VI. As such, the belief Puritanism was anything but religiously radical in relation to English, and indeed British, culture stands as one of his great achievements as an historian.
In 2011, Boydell Press published Collinson's memoir, The History of a History Man Or, the Twentieth Century Viewed from a Safe Distance. The Memoirs of Patrick Collinson as part of its Church of England Record Society Series.[3] Collinson was the founding President of the society.