Bossuet, Burnet, and the English Reformation

In the parts of the Histoire des variations des Églises protestantes that he devoted to England, Bossuet adopted a polemical strategy that somewhat differs from the one he adopted throughout the rest of his work. The Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet had just published the lengthy History of the Reformation of the Church of England. Bossuet set out to show, based on ­Burnet’s own text, the impossibility of regarding the Anglican Church as the product of an authentically religious reform.