Five English Reformers tells the story of John Hooper, Rowland Taylor, Hugh Latimer, John Bradford and Nicholas Ridley, bishops and preachers put to death during the Marian persecution. J. C. Ryle opens with an account of why they died, insisting that the issue was doctrinal rather than political, then gives each man a chapter covering his ministry, his trial and his death, drawing extensively on the records and on their own letters.

Ryle wrote to remind a comfortable church what its inheritance had cost, and the book still functions that way. It suits readers new to Reformation history, family reading aloud, and anyone wanting to understand why the doctrinal questions of the sixteenth century were held to be worth dying for. Ryle's prose is plain and his admiration undisguised.