Sacred space, sacred things, and sacred doctrine lay at the heart of the religious upheavals in early modern Europe. Noting that Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin had declared no earthly place or thing holier than another, scholars have represented the Protestant Reformation as a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Starkly expressed, this view portrays a pre-Reformation Christianity in which God chose to channel his power through places, things, and ritual gestures, against a Protestantism in which the divine power was delegated to no earthly thing. This dissertation revises that picture in two important ways. First, it emphasizes that authorities in Protestant England, from the late years of the sixteenth century, contributed in prescription and practice to a progressive sacralization of space and things in English church and society. Loudly proclaimed differences between popery and the Gospel have occluded evidence of continuities in belief and behavior. If no material thing was holy, "sacrilege" — the stealing or profaning of things dedicated to God — would have become a term of decreasing usefulness; instead, it grew more important. In England, many Protestant clergy and laity (Sir Henry Spelman is a prominent example) were especially uneasy about the secularizations of ecclesiastical property in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I. They dramatically indicated their anxieties by increasingly elaborate and articulate notions of how God cursed the sacrilegious. Second, scholars tend to represent the post-Reformation English church as contested between two groups. One, a Calvinist majority, was reputedly faithful to the sensibilities of the Elizabethan church and thus relatively unmoved by any imagined sanctity of space and things. The other, associated with William Laud, obsessed over their profanation. Yet often Calvinists spearheaded measures for the protection of sacred things, and contributed enthusiastically to the contemporary sacrilege discourse. This dissertation draws on the prescriptions of ecclesiastical authorities and liturgical practice, as well as sermons, theological works, and polemical literature. Research was conducted primarily at archives in England: at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and, in London, at the British Library and Lambeth Palace.