In 1559 during the Scottish Reformation, the leaders of the Protestant nobility, the Lords of the Congregation, asked Knox to write a history of the movement.
By this time he probably had completed drafts of the third book which chronicles the events leading up to the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots in Scotland.
However, its own qualities as a text and its ideological context have only been examined in more recent years, starting with Arthur Williamson of New York University's Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI, (1979).
To this Knox brought his evident skills as a preacher and his doctrine of adherence to biblical texts, with application not just to moral situations but in legal contexts and political argument.
Roger A Mason, of St Andrews University, summarized this aspect of the History of the Reformation, "This kind of thinking, with its strong apocalyptic overtones, is evident on virtually every page of Knox's surviving writings."