Norman Jones studied under G. R. Elton, and his first book, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion 1559 (1982), won the Whitefield Prize from the Royal Historical Society. His other books include God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (1989); The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (1993), and The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2002). He has co-edited a number of volumes with David Dean, Robert Tittler, Susan Doran, and Daniel Woolf. He has held a number of fellowships, including Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, where much of the work for this book was done.

"If one is looking for a fascinating, well-organized, and highly readable description of how England was governed during Queen Elizabeth I's more than 40 year reign, Norman Jones' Governing by Virtue is a study to take in hand...Jones' study is a perceptive discussion of three things: the fascinating Lord Burghley, England under an opinionated monarch, and the civic virtues of those at all levels, but especially the local, who proved essential for the stability of Elizabethan England"--Rudolph P. Almasy, Anglican and Episcopal History