Traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay, and indeed in the whole host of ways, from the multiplication of vernacular religious books to adaptations within the national and regional cult of the saints, was showing itself well able to meet new needs and new conditions” (p.
“It is the contention of the first part of the book,” Duffy writes, “that late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation. which re-orders one’s thinking about much of England’s religious past.” It is, as Jack Scarisbrick said: “A mighty and momentous book.
Born in Ireland and a “cradle Catholic,” Duffy is a professor of history at Cambridge University, and he describes (drawing almost exclusively from primary sources) and illustrates (providing extensive photographs) the rich and vibrant religious life in late Medieval England before the Reformation-or what is more accurately labeled the “Anglican Schism.” The bulk of the book is devoted to describing the laity’s religious life in the late Medieval period, whereas the final third of the book is devoted to the changes wrought in the church by Henry VIII and his children. However, my understanding of that era was significantly challenged and changed by reading Eamon Duffy’s deeply-informative reassessment of Reformation historiography: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, c. In graduate school I studied ancient and medieval history, but my knowledge of the English Reformation was largely derived from textbooks-and they generally cast a positive light on the English Reformation and its established Protestant church. In time I also learned that John Wesley was, throughout his life, a priest in the Church of England, so Nazarenes derive their heritage not from Luther and Calvin but from the church brought into being by King Henry VIII in the 1530s. Growing up in the Church of the Nazarene I learned we were Wesleyans-a theological position demonstrably different from both Catholicism and Calvinism.
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