Mark A. Hutchinson is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at Lancaster University, UK. Prior to this, Mark was a Junior Research Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. He has also held a　 Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork. Other recent publications include 'The Emergence of the State in Elizabethan Ireland and England, c.1575 to 1599', Sixteenth Century Journal (2014) and 'An Irish Perspective on Elizabeth's Religion: Reformation Thought and Henry Sidney's Irish Deputyship, c.1560 to 1580', in Elizabeth I and Ireland (CUP 2014).

Despite the best efforts of the English government, Elizabethan Ireland remained resolutely Catholic. Hutchinson examines this 'failure' of the Protestant Reformation. He argues that the emerging political concept of the absolutist state forms a crucial link between English policy in Ireland and the aims of the Calvinist reformers.

Introduction; Chapter 1 Building a Godly Polity in Ireland; Chapter 2 The Failure of Reformed Protestant Plans; Chapter 3 Irish Constitutional Peculiarity; Chapter 4 The End of an Irish Mixed Polity; Chapter 5 Ireland's Lordships and an Absolutist State; Chapter 6 An Irish State Theory; epilogue Epilogue: Beyond the 1590s;