For example although even the English bible was denied to the laity, little account is taken of the intense pressure, political and social to conform to traditional practices. Conformity in those circumstances does not imply commitment.

The reader asked to accept that the collapse in traditional will formats under Edward, when not a single catholic was burned, was only because these formats were now discouraged; but the rather partial recovery in traditional religion under Mary, when nearly 300 people were burned for their views, was simply people wanted it. Throughout, the impact of the teaching of that rather inconvenient second commandment, on the use of images is ignored. There are many, other examples in the work.

It is easy to be carried along with the flow of Duffy's rhetoric and the vigour of his assertions but point after point is either partial or highly contentious. It really does need to be read in conjunction with e.g. Whiting's, Local Responses to the English Reformation which provides a framework within which the various claims can be assessed.

Top rating for the description of late medieval religion but as an analytical work it is far too selective.


A revolution in thinking about the English church.   January 11, 2000
 51 out of 60 found this review helpful

During the last 30 years there has been a revolution in our thinking about the 16th century English church. This has been the result of a vast body of and also a great deal of cross-referring to other primary sources, including the church buildings themselves. One of the richest fruits of all this research is this extraordinary book, which manages to capture in less than a thousand pages the full panoply of pre-Reformation liturgy and life, and how it was effectively destroyed by the reformers. This study and others like it confront head-on the received tradition of a moribund and corrupt medieval English church 'rescued' by the Reformation. This tradition arose largely from the enthusiasm of the Oxford Movement, and the Anglican revival for which it was responsible. This harnessed popular anti-Catholic prejudice in the 19th century, to create the illusion of a modern Church of England which had evolved naturally from the church of St Augustine and the mind of the medieval liturgy, stripped of its corruption and excesses. The Reformation was presented by these people as a smooth, evolutionary process, whereby roods, wallpaintings, etc., were removed from churches in the 16th century because of 'new liturgical practices' that no longer required them. Any idea that the Reformation in England was a violent and unpopular fracture was quietly lost. The obvious destruction that had taken place in English parish churches was most often attributed to the ultra-protestant Puritans of a century later. Duffy, however, documents in some detail how the churches of England were comprehensively wrecked between 1538 and 1553, and then again after Elizabeth I's accession in 1558. He uses documentary evidence to show how this happened in specific churches, particularly in East Anglia. He visits these churches, to examine the damage that was caused. Ironically, the dull-headed attempt by Mary I to restore the Catholic church to England in the 1550s has left us with a great deal of evidence of the destruction that had occurred up to that point. Today, in many church guides this destruction is still attributed to William Dowsing and his fellow-Puritans of the 1640s. They are not men to be blamed for nothing; but Duffy unfolds in this book an amazing story, one all too rarely told, of an earlier holocaust on a massive scale. It enhances our understanding of how English parish churches have come to look the way they do. It also has tremendous consequences for our thinking about the modern Anglican church. It has to be said that there are those who are not entirely comfortable with this revisionist history. Some find it difficult because of the way it contradicts the Reformation history that English people of a certain age have grown up with. Some others will find it hard to accept that late-medieval English Catholicism was popular. For Anglo-Catholics, there is the further difficulty that Duffy (and others) is suggesting that the Church of England is not the inheritor of the medieval English church in they way they had understood. One Suffolk vicar with whom I discussed this (he will remain nameless; in any case, he is now in the Exeter diocese) said "Duffy is nothing but a bog-Irish upstart". Any book that causes a reaction like that HAS to be worth reading.