Born in Warwickshire in the year of Elizabeth's accession, and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, Perkins was made a Fellow of his college at the age of twenty-four and preached and lectured at Great St. Andrews in Cambridge until he died in 1602 at the early age of forty-four.
Perkins had enormous influence. Called "the father of English Puritanism," and "the most important Puritan writer," Perkins was the first theologian of the reformed English church to gain an international reputation. By the end of the century, Perkins had replaced John Calvin and Theodore Beza as the most popular author of religious works in England. Known as the greatest teacher of the Puritan "plain style of preaching," Perkins wrote that preaching "must be plain, perspicuous, and evident.... It is a by-word among us: 'It was a very plain Sermon': And I say again, the plainer, the better." Even in 1613, eleven years after his death, when Thomas Goodwin went up to Cambridge, Goodwin wrote that "the whole town was filled with the discourse of the power of Mr. Perkins' ministry." "Master Perkins," said Samuel Clarke, "held forth a burning and shining light, the sparks whereof did fly abroad into all the corners of the kingdom."
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