John Knox

John Knox was a Scottish minister, theologian, and leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. The First Blast of the Trumpet was published anonymously in 1558 and argued against rule by women, responding especially to the Catholic queens who governed England and Scotland. Its timing proved politically damaging when the Protestant Elizabeth I soon inherited the English throne and rejected Knox's attempted distinction between her rule and the book's target. Knox had earlier served as a preacher, endured imprisonment in the French galleys, and spent years in England and Geneva, where he encountered Reformed theology associated with John Calvin. Returning to Scotland in 1559, he helped shape the reformed church and contributed to its confession and book of discipline. His History of the Reformation in Scotland became another major record of the period. The First Blast remains important less as a complete statement of his theology than as evidence of the era's volatile mixture of religion, monarchy, gender, and polemical print.