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 15^th and early 16^th 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?’

Part One also includes chapters on the dissolution of Ely Priory, a Benedictine priory originally founded by St Ethelreda, and on the King James Bible, which Duffy describes as a ‘magnificent translation’ of the scriptures. Another fascinating chapter covers the English Catholic seminary at Douai in modern-day France, which was founded in 1568 and moved for a time to Rheims.

One of the Douai professors, Gregory Martin, produced an important English translation of the New Testament in 1582. While the focus in most seminaries at the time was on practical pastoral skills, Douai was unusual in its emphasis on Scripture – in recognition of the fact that debate with Protestants would probably be important in the life of future English priests. As time went on, harsh persecution meant that such debate did not, in fact, become a realistic option in the immediate future.

The chapter ‘1569: A People’s Tragedy?’ covers resistance to the Reformation, and particularly the rebellion in the North of England in 1569, where the desire to restore Catholicism was the ‘single most important motive’ for the rebels.

Historical interpretations

Part Two reflects on ‘Writing the Reformation’ and looks at how the Reformation has been studied and understood in the centuries since. It includes chapters on Luther through Catholic eyes, and on historians such as James Anthony Froude and AG Dickens. Froude was highly critical of the ‘ferocious campaign against heresy’ carried out by the Catholic Queen Mary and regarded the advent of Protestantism and the repudiation of Papal authority as an ‘immense blessing, a necessary step in the emergence of the modern world and of English values, and a prelude to future imperial greatness’.