Eamon Duffy

Elite and Popular Religion: The Book of Hours and Lay Piety in the Later Middle Ages

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?

‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

The Shock of Change: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Elizabethan Church Of England

This paper questions accounts of the English Reformation which, in line with sometimes unacknowledged Anglo-Catholic assumptions, present it as a mere clean-up operation, the creation of a reformed Catholicism which removed medieval excesses but left an essentially Catholic Church of England intact. It argues instead that the Elizabethan reformers intended to establish a Reformed Church which would be part of a Protestant international Church, emphatic in disowning its medieval inheritance and rejecting the religion of Catholic Europe, with formularies, preaching and styles of worship designed to signal and embody that rejection. But Anglican self-identity was never simply or unequivocally Protestant. Lay and clerical conservatives resisted the removal of the remains of the old religion, and vestiges of the Catholic past were embedded like flies in amber in the Prayer Book liturgy, in church buildings, and in the attitudes and memories of many of its Elizabethan personnel. By the early seventeenth century influential figures in the Church of England were seeking to distance themselves from European Protestantism, and instead to portray the Church of England as a conscious via media between Rome and Geneva. In the hands of the Laudians and their followers, this newer interpretation of the Reformation was to prove potent in reshaping the Church of Englands self-understanding.

Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: the Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century England

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas a Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

The Reception of Turner's Newman : A Reply to Simon Skinner

In his article on the critical reception of the late Frank Turners John Henry Newman: the challenge to Evangelical religion, Simon Skinner contends that Turners study is ‘empirically exhaustive, contextually assured and critically rigorous’, and he cites with approval Andrew Wilsons judgement that it ‘revolutionizes Newman studies’.1 But this historical masterpiece, he thinks, has been unjustly howled down by a benighted posse of Roman Catholic reviewers, ‘almost none of [whom] are … tenured in a university history department’. Turners Catholic reviewers, ‘which is to say nearly all reviewers’, are therefore ‘amateurs’, who ‘literally could not comprehend’ what Turner was up to.2 But history is not an arcane discipline, and Skinners complaint about the ‘lack of disciplinary equipment’ of these hostile reviewers seems hardly to the point in relation to a book offered by a major publisher to a general readership. The ordinary rules of historical evidence are intelligible to anybody, and a de haut en bas restriction of the right to an opinion on Turners book to the gild of professional historians runs the risk of seeming both arbitrary and condescending.

Thomas More’s Confutation: A Literary Failure?

Between June 1529 and December 1533 Thomas More published no fewer than seven books comprising more than a million words against the Reformation. The young More had achieved European fame as the author of Utopia , and the friend and defender of the greatest scholar, satirist and literary innovator of the age, Desiderius Erasmus. Utopia remains one of the handful of books which would have to be included in any representative library of Western civilization. More himself, however, came to place a far higher value on the remarkable stream of English works which gushed from his pen in the four years leading up to his arrest and imprisonment in the Tower, which, however, are nowadays read, if at all, mainly as evidence that More was losing his grip. They form a remarkable series: the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Supplication of Souls , in June and September 1529 respectively; the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (Part I, the Preface and Books I–III, published in January 1532, and Part II, Books IV–VIII, more than a year later, after his resignation as Chancellor). That same year, 1533, saw the last four in this astonishing polemical outpouring, the Apology of Sir Thomas More , the Debellation of Salem and Byzance , the Answer to a Poisoned Book and the Letter Against Frith . Though these books were directed against a variety of authors, Mores main target, implicit even in writings ostensibly directed against others, was the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale. More viewed Tyndale as the most important conduit for Lutheran ideas into England, and he saw in Tyndale’s version of the New Testament the fountainhead from which lesser heresiarchs drew lethal draughts of error with which to poison the souls of unsuspecting English men and women.

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and anti-papal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village where thirty-three families worked the difficult land on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebaths conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebaths only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychays accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 - culminating in the siege of Exeter which ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced. Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community: reluctantly Protestant, no longer focused on the religious life of the parish church, and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebaths priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered, and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.