2017, marking the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and the beginnings of his reform movement which convulsed Europe, has focused attention on the wide-ranging effects and the nature of Reformation activities. Duffy's fourteen essays bring detailed historical studies to bear on religious divisions and disputations as they emerged in England. This book is welcome for the depth of its presentations and for focusing on the intense internal conflicts that Churches experienced.
Duffy's focus on England is expressed in the three parts of the book. The first considers ‘Thomas More and Heresy’. The second presents pieces on ‘Counter-Reformation England’ and the third centres on ‘The Godly and the Conversion of England’. Together, these are studies in transitions. Duffy notes the influence of John Bossy, Christianity in the West and sees his own essays as engaging with transitional elements that Bossy had targeted. Overall, says Duffy, his book is ‘about the reformation – or, rather, the attempted reformations – of Christian England, and about the divisions among and between those who sought to reform and convert it’ (p. 10).
Thomas More's life and work were important as opening the opposition to England's first Protestant reformers. His arguments were used by later writers to oppose heresies and his A dialogue concerning heresies (June 1529) was the first of six works against the Reformation (p. 50). The Dialogue took the form of a fictional conversation between a young ‘Messenger’ and ‘More’ (p. 52), the Messenger being ‘vulnerable to evangelical persuasions but in intention at least a docile Catholic seeking correction’ (p. 53). Their conversations range over a number of issues and Duffy maintains that More's ‘principle concern in the Dialogue’ is to ‘defend the presence of Christ in the life of the Church as embodied in its devotional and sacramental practice’ (p. 57). This led to More's defence of ‘the legitimacy of the symbolic forms in which devotion to the saints is expressed – pilgrimage, the veneration of relics and images, and the miracles worked by their intercession’ (p. 57).
The last book of the Dialogue took on Luther's teachings, which More regarded as the worst of heresies. Luther was lethal to Christian society because ‘his exaltation of faith alone as the key to salvation made virtue irrelevant and thereby dissolved all order and moral cohesion’ (p. 71). More viewed Luther's teachings on justification as ‘leading directly to antinomianism’, as More put it: ‘plunging [men] headlong into that licentious way of life which you strive to introduce under the pretext of evangelic liberty’ (p. 71). Behind Luther's teachings on justification stood the reformer's view of predestination, against which More recoiled, along with Luther's repudiation of humanity's ‘free will’ – the issue of contention between Luther and Erasmus. For More, the Christian humanist, ‘salvation was the crowning and purification by grace of man's natural inclination towards virtue’ (p. 71). Luther's views renounced the foundations of common human morality as well as Christian virtue in particular. This, along with Luther's other suspect teachings, led to ‘More's passionate insistence that the reformation had to be halted at all costs, before it took hold in England’ (p. 72).
Duffy's essay on ‘The confutation of Tyndale's answer’ shows More's use of all his ‘formidable resources of invective and an unrelenting battery of argument against Tyndale and his fellow reformers’ (p. 81). During Queen Mary's reign, More's Confutation was included in More's English works to provide a major polemical resource for the Marian Church (p. 93).
The seven essays in part ii study Catholicism in England from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. These too are rich pieces beginning with ‘Cardinal Reginald Pole preaching’, Pole being the figure who led the recovery of the reputation of Thomas More (who had been executed for treason in 1535) and John Fisher to a ‘symbolic role at the heart of a newly resurgent Catholicism’ in 1553 when Mary became queen (p. 99). Duffy argues for Pole's powerful influence on Elizabethan Catholicism as it developed. This supplements his previously stated more positive view of the earlier vitality of Marian Catholicism.
Another figure of note to whom Duffy devotes an essay is Pole's successor as ‘Cardinal of England’, William Allen. Along with his pastoral vision and urging for seminary priests and Jesuits to come to England, Allen was also ‘to place the excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth and the theoretical and practical right of the Pope to perform such an act, at the centre of his political thinking’ (pp. 154–5). Allen's important theological colleague, the remarkable Gregory Martin, is presented in ‘The mind of Gregory Martin’, an essay to remedy Martin as ‘one of the most unjustly half-forgotten’ reformers. The other illuminating essays in this part of the book focus on prayer and devotion, the English secular clergy, disputes over Jansenism and recusant readings of the Reformation.
Four studies of Protestant attempts to reform and convert England conclude the book. Initial here is ‘The Reformed pastor in English Puritanism’, centring on Richard Baxter, his The reformed pastor, and his pastoral methods. Baxter's works represent ‘the first elaborated puritan theology of pastoral as distinct from preaching ministry in English’ (p. 344). While Baxter's novel methods were successful in some places, ‘they were destined to be set aside, with the restoration of the monarchy and the episcopal order of the Church of England’ (p. 344).
Other attempts to reform the nation are presented in Duffy's essays, ‘The godly and the multitude’ and ‘The long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the multitude’. His work concludes with a study of ‘George Fox and the reform of the Reformation’. Duffy notes that what was ‘distinctive about Fox's message is that his eschatology is internalized apocalypse written in the heart of man’ (p. 420). Yet Fox's Quaker movement turned people ‘not inwards but outwards, to their fellows, to the poor and oppressed, even to their enemies, and to the rich, on whom also they had compassion’ (p. 428). Fox's journal, says Duffy, is ‘arguably the most remarkable religious document of the English seventeenth century’ (p. 428).
Duffy's remarkable resource will continue to instruct and inform for years to come.
