Few books by historians of the Christian church have enjoyed the success that Eamon Duffy's powerful Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–1580 has had ever since its release in 1992. In tracing patterns of devotional life from the late fifteenth century through the destructive disturbances of the Reformation, his book has had a wide and pervasive influence. Duffy has followed Stripping of the Altars with a dozen other studies in Catholic spirituality and history, including an exploration of sixteenth-century life in a remote Devonshire village in The Voices of Morebath (2001); reflections on contemporary devotions in the Catholic Church in Faith of Our Fathers (2004); and an analysis of the reign of Queen Mary I in Fires of Faith (2009). Now, in A People's Tragedy, Duffy brings together eleven essays, some not previously published, to take up the themes of myth, meaning, popular choice, and resistance in English religion from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth and beyond.
The first half of the volume considers historical events and questions, featuring pilgrimage, Bible translation, and a violent uprising in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1569. The second half concerns historiography: how the Reformation has been perceived by historians, dramatists, and novelists, and what it means for people today. This review will focus on a selection of subjects that reflect many of Duffy's recurrent themes, including the loss and wastage that the Reformation imposed upon a largely unwilling populace.
One of Duffy's perennial concerns has been to establish (against the perceptions of a previous generation of historians, including the late A. G. Dickens) that the mediaeval church was largely in a healthy state until it was overtaken by the Tudor regime, especially by King Henry VIII, his daughter Elizabeth, and their agents, notably Thomas Cromwell. Thus, Duffy explores pilgrimages at English cathedrals and the competition among them to draw crowds. Canterbury, with its shrine to St Thomas Becket (murdered in 1170), had the lead, and his cult ‘promoted the fashion for holy bishops’ (p. 10) elsewhere, including Durham, Lincoln and York. Canterbury seems to have attracted some 80,000 pilgrims in 1420, but thereafter, a gradual decline occurred. Still, Duffy believes that there was no ‘lack of confidence in pilgrimage as an institution’ (p. 27) until the Crown abruptly destroyed England's shrines from 1538.
The title essay, ‘1569: A People's Tragedy?’ concerns an under-studied rising in Durham against the Elizabethan religious settlement, which failed to place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne. The rebels raised an army of six thousand men, one-third of whom were local gentlemen and substantial yeomen. The rising was a more dangerous threat than the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and Lincolnshire Rebellion, or the 1549 Prayer Book Risings that Duffy discussed in Stripping of the Altars. Briefly, the Catholic Mass was restored. But when the revolt collapsed, it was followed by ‘the most savage reprisals of even that bloody Tudor century’ (p. 48). More than seven hundred were hanged and vital resources were laid waste in midwinter. Moreover, the whole episode has been left almost uncommemorated to erase the memory of what happened then.
The most important chapter in the second half of the book is a long reflection about the tensions between fiction and fact in writing about the Reformation. Led by Andrew Pettegree of the University of St Andrews, historians have noted that John Foxe's sixteenth-century Book of Martyrs dominated the historiography and popular perceptions of the Reformation until quite recently. But today, the common understanding is set by television programmes, and especially by Hilary Mantel's award-winning trilogy of novels on Cromwell's life, beginning with Wolf Hall (2009). Many commentators have noted that Mantel's interpretation owes much to the late G. R. Elton, but Duffy's special concern is her treatment of Cromwell, with Sir Thomas More as the foil. Her casting of More as an embittered persecutor not only dethroned the attractive portrait of More that was established in the mid-twentieth century by Robert Bolt's Man for All Seasons, but also, Duffy contends, is a misreading of the evidence of More's own letters. In life More may not have resembled either fictionalized characterisation, but Duffy argues that Mantel has taken fiction and blurred it unhelpfully into something that can be understood as fact. He sees in her motives a new kind of iconoclasm for today.
Not every reader will accept uncritically Duffy's contention that the Reformation in England was mainly destructive, though he notes in passing that open access to the Bible (with the Book of Common Prayer) has developed the English language substantially, beyond all precedents. A People's Tragedy is a lively book. As food for thought, it is a valuable contribution to the field.
