Diarmaid MacCulloch was brought up in a country rectory in Suffolk and studied under the great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton. He is now a Fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author of A History of Christianity, and most recently of Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490 - 1700 (2004), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, the British Academy Prize and the Non-Fiction Award from the National Book Critics Circle of the USA.