The Protestant Reformation: upending England
Book Review by Tim O’Sullivan, Mercator.
A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation By Eamon Duffy. Bloomsbury Continuum. London, 2020. 272 pages
In 1992, Eamon Duffy wrote his acclaimed history of the English Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars. It maintained that, contrary to received wisdom, popular Catholicism had considerable strength and vigour in England before the Reformation and that the Reformation was imposed in that country only with considerable difficulty and after a long period of time.
As he puts it in this more recent work, there is ‘a growing awareness of the existence of widespread discontent with and resistance to the Reformation process, which is now understood as a long labour, not a rapid and popular push-over.’
Duffy’s 1992 book highlighted hitherto neglected aspects of late medieval Christianity in England, for example, massive lay investment in the rebuilding and furnishing for Catholic worship of many of the parish churches of pre-Reformation England, in the 15th and early 16th centuries.
Duffy is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge. He returns to the Reformation in this absorbing book of historical essays.
Common faith
Part One presents ‘Studies in Reformation’ and considers hitherto neglected aspects of English religion, such as pilgrimages and monasticism. The opening chapter looks at cathedral pilgrimages in the late Middle Ages and at the shrines contained in such cathedrals, notably the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Duffy talks of the ‘embedding of cathedral pilgrimage in a much broader landscape of holiness’. For example, testators at the time often asked in their wills for surrogates to go on their behalf to various pilgrimage sites in England or even further afield.
With the destruction of the medieval Cathedral shrine, Duffy argues, ‘one of the most vital and persistent institutions of medieval Christianity was snuffed out… and a resonant symbol of hope and healing banished from the great buildings that had sheltered it for half a millennium. Who can doubt that the English imagination was poorer for it?’
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
