John Knox has seldom been taken seriously as a literary figure in fact it is often assumed that he was hostile to art of any kind. This study analyses John Knoxs style of writing and suggests that Knox was one of the most highly rhetorical of all the sixteenthcentury prose writers although his prose was never decorative. Early chapters set Knox in his proper context by focusing on Scottish prose from John Irelands Meroure of Wyssdome through to The Complaynt of Scotland before examining Knoxs admonitory public epistles his personal correspondence and his more exclusively theological tracts. The final two chapters are devoted to his magnum opus The Historie of the Reformatioun of Religioun in Scotland the first truly great work of Scots prose and show that Knoxs talents represent the culmination of homiletic and historiographical traditions the maturation of incipient religious forces in the sixteenth century and as far as prose is concerned the earliest establishment in Scotland of a fully rounded literary personality.