Offers a reassessment of the career and the scholarly achievements of Thomas Fuller, showing that he was a many-sided writer, theologian, and controversialist, as well as a highly significant historian~Describes how Fuller's distinctive ideas and engaging manner of expression emerged in the tumultuous era of civil wars in which he lived~Shows that Fuller was nurtured by a distinctive English tradition of looking at the past, a tradition shaped by a generation of Elizabethan writers and scholars and their later followers~Provides a clear account of the development of European and English historical writing across three centuries