Bloomsbury Continuum first edition - 2020
Eamon Duffy describes himself as a cradle Catholic and he is clearly a Catholic apologist, although he can have some sharp words for individual Roman Catholics, including popes. I already had his The Stripping of the Altars (1992), for which he is probably best known, and Marking the Hours (2006). He is an excellent historian, gifted with subtle insight and a deep historical understanding, wearing his undoubted learning with commendable lightness. So, what of this tome, subtitled Studies in Reformation?
It is divided into two Parts: the first using the same subheading and the second entitled Writing the Reformation. I found the latter by far the most interesting and informative. There are five sections, concentrating on Martin Luther, J. A. Froude, A.G. Dickens, Walsingham and Fiction and Faction. I learnt something from each chapter. I hadn't realised how, as long ago as the mid-1960s, many theologians had come to believe that there was fundamental agreement between Catholics and Protestants on the contested issue of Justification. However, others like Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and the English historian Richard Rex, argued that in the end Luther was a heretic not a Catholic dissident. The chapter on Froude highlights the fact we should know the Historian and his times before we know his History. My thought was, "yes we must, Eamon Duffy"! Froude could be commended for his untiring use of source material (usually manuscripts no-one else had used), but he distrusted the masses, accepted contemporary racial theories (English over Irish and whites over blacks) and regarded the advent of Protestantism and the repudiation of papal authority as an immense blessing. A.G. Dickens was one of the mainstays of my student and teaching careers. Duffy suggests that G.G. Coulton, a more polemical historian (a fanatic, with a deep loathing and fear of Roman Catholicism in general and monks in particular), influenced Dickens, who weighed the late medieval Church and invariably found it wanting. The more I read the chapter, the more I came down on the side of Dickens and not Duffy! The chapter on Walsingham merely showed to me that some Anglicans could be as superstitious as Roman Catholics. I have never supported Marian idolatry.
The most interesting chapter to me was the last. I liked the way Duffy explored the importance of historical fiction in shaping people's minds - the sectarian propaganda of Fr Robert Hugh Benson; the more measured approach of Ford Madox Ford; the very different treatment of Cromwell and More in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for all Seasons, and Hilary Mantel's trilogy, beginning with Wolf Hall. We all have our prejudices, and I haven't read a word of Mantel's hagiography of Cromwell and her malign disparagement of More. Duffy clearly doesn't agree with her portrayals and David Starkey, typically, is contemptuous of such historical novelists.
As for the first Part, the chapters are what one would expect from a Catholic historian, who calls his book A People's Tragedy. That on cathedral pilgrimages only highlights for me the cupidity of the church as well as the genuine need to provide for the superstitious masses; he (I believe rightly) emphasises the genuine religious conservatism behind the 1569 Rebellion; explains very well the importance of the Catholic colleges set up at Douai and Rheims; provides a well researched account of the origins and influence of the King James Bible; and praises the not-so-well-known reminiscences of Richard Baxter.
It does a (nominally) Protestant good to read a different slant on the Reformation. Eamon Duffy has produced an excellent (by and large) defence of Sixteenth Century and Late Medieval Catholicism.
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