Eamon DuffyRecensioni

After reading a lot of early European history during the past weeks, I wanted to read a book that would help me understand "who was who" in the papacy during this period and what all of the religious controversies were about. Unfortunately, this book left me as confused about the popes as I was before I read it. The main reason for this is that the events of the Middle Ages are only sketched out in a way that would only make sense to people who already had a good understanding of the period.

The book gets better starting with the 19th century. The popes are fleshed out more as are the religious and political issues. The best chapter is the last one as it provides very detailed analyses of the most modern popes. The book provides a useful glossary as well as a nice list of all the popes.½

One of those classics of late medieval/early modern history that it's assumed anyone in the field has read, and that I've thus long felt guilty for never having done so. In my defense it is a brick of a book, crammed full of evidence for the vitality of religious life on a personal and parochial life in an England on the verge of the Reformation.

Eamon Duffy marshalls a wide array of sources—wills, journals, liturgies, and more—to I think successfully make the case that, contra many centuries of historiography that was Protestant in its sympathies, Catholicism in late medieval England was far from moribund, at least at a grass-roots level. I would also agree with him that the shift of the general population's religious convictions, identities, and preferences took place over a span of generations and was not so abrupt as had often been assumed. As for Duffy's framing of the actions of the reformers overall actions and the chronological framework he employs, your feelings about it will probably be shaped by whether your allegiances lie with Rome (as Duffy's clearly do) or against.

These essays by the noted church historian were written in the later years of the papacy of John Paul II yet Duffy's reflections in issues such as authority in the church, traditionalism, saints and popular religion are timeless. Timeless is not code for abstract or trivial, Duffy has things to say about celibacy, the child abuse scandals and much more. I didn't always agree with Duffy but each essay caused me to heck my own knowledge and experience, and set me thinking and re-examining my own assumptions about my church, the Roman Catholic church.

At first sight confirms all we ever thought about medieval Catholicism, but the message is that this was popular and regretted when it was lost. Details the enthusiasm for return to images and sacramentalism in many parishes and their efforts to preserve images when they were out of favour. Purgatory was a dominant fear and tremendous efforts were exerted to call upon those left behind to shorten it with prayer. The Host was worshipped and when Mary returned people in Kent were forced to kneel before it. He says that the service was widely understood, even in Latin, and there was a lot of religious material available in English. However Bibles were rapidly removed when Catholics returned and sermons were about morality not knowledge. Elizabeth's long reign ensured that all the imagery eventually was lost and did not return.
Very long book but beautifully written passages make it compelling reading.
It is an answer to the standard Protestant account of the Reformation provided by Dickens in the 80s.½

Duffy expresses surprise that this became a best-seller, and no shit: this is some detailed, historiographically-conscious, "I'm going to assume you know all the main events" stuff. It's also gloriously interesting, and surprisingly readable.

I found this less gripping than the other Duffy works I have read, and at times it seemed that Duffy the Catholic and Duffy the historian had come to awkward compromises. There were certain details of history that I expected, but did not find.

That said, it is really an amazing feat to include the whole history of the popes into a single readable volume. I certainly recommend reading this book, but it is not the last word on the subject.

I read the 2014 fourth edition.

As a series of essays on a variety of subjects, this is a good introduction to Duffy's scholarship.½

This is undoubtedly an excellent resource both on the religious life of Medieval and early Modern England, and on the history of the Reformations elimination of many popular forms of devotion. However it was more information than I really need or want on the subject. If this is your era, or your subject I recommend it highly.

Deals with Tradition and Authority in the Church

Ch 7 looks at the Book of Hours of Thomas More, published 1530, and preserved at Yale library. To it he added at Latin Psalter which he annotated during his final captivity.

[Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor] By Eamon Duffy.
Describing himself as a cradle catholic historian Eamon Duffy sets himself the target of re-evaluating the religious policy of Queen Mary 1 who ruled England from July 1553 until her death in November 1558. Mary Tudor known today as bloody Mary attempted to role back the protestant revolution instigated by her Father Henry VIII and taken forward by her half brother Edward VI. During a four year campaign she burnt alive 284 protestants 56 of them women who were found guilty of heresy. Duffy is keen to challenge the perception that Mary’s church was backward looking and reactionary sharing the queen’s bitter pre-occupation with the past and her tragic sterility and that her atrocious campaign of burnings was not merely an outrage against human decency but also a devastating political blunder.

One of the most high profile burnings was that of the Archbishop of Canterbury; Thomas Cranmer. This execution seemed personal as Cranmer had recanted and had embraced the catholic faith, but a witness to the execution while having every sympathy with the old man’s plight reflected that Cranmer must pay for his sins and so deserved his terrible fate. Duffy reminds us that:

This nuanced, humane, but ultimately steely assessment should give us pause before reading twenty-first century attitudes and values into the complexities of the remote past.

The hero of Duffy’s book (if we can call him that) is Cardinal Reginald Pole who came hotfoot from Rome when Mary seized her crown from Jane Seymour. Pole was Mary’s cousin and had been in exile, he returned to England and masterminded the queens religious programme. Duffy says that the policy was well thought out, well controlled and used inducements as well as coercion to change the face of religion in England. Duffy makes the telling point that the protestant reformation had been largely grafted onto the government of England. Henry VIII for conjugal, political and largely financial reasons had made himself Head of the church of England, but it was his son Edward who took the policy much further surrounding himself with protestant sympathisers. The old catholic religion was still very much the religion of the people especially in the north of the Country and the stripping of the altars had caused much resentment. It was not surprising therefore that a Catholic queen was able to first of all to get the support of the common people, who saw few problems in going back to the old ways.

Duffy does not play down the atrocities of the executions, but confronts them head on. He points out that much of what we know about the individual executions comes from John Fox’s [Acts and Monuments] written during Elizabeth I reign and by a protestant (the winning side). Duffy while not playing down the brutality of the burnings is concerned with putting them in the perspective of the religious policies. The executions were carried out only after the catholic commissioners were completely satisfied that their victims would not recant. Most of them were examined over long periods of time and every effort was made to get them to change their minds and so escape execution. Duffy points out that this could have been a propaganda coup for the catholics if they could get leading protestants to recant, but this must be seen in conjunction with the commissioners overarching belief that they were on a mission to save people’s souls. Duffy is able to provide evidence from the commissioners own paperwork and instructions to them provided by Cardinal Pole.

Duffy tackles issues surrounding martyrdom and the need for Queen Mary and her government to stamp out dissent which could have resulted in her overthrow. In his final chapter he talks about Mary’s governments legacy; with the death of the queen and very shortly after Cardinal Pole, the repressive measures died with them. Queen Elizabeth I made her own religious settlement making herself Head of the Church and welcoming back those protestants who had sought exile. Duffy says that the main legacy was in providing writers and thinkers who would influence the counter revolution in Europe. Duffy’s book provides ample reasons why it is worthwhile to look again at religious persecution during Mary’s reign.

The book is not a general history of religion in England during Mary’s time, nor is it a political assessment of her reign; it focuses on her religious policies and how they were implemented. It is an interesting and thought provoking read backed up with notes, an index and a select bibliography. A four star read.

Now a classic study of the changes in the life of the Church in the English Reformation.

Everyone seems to have a bias on this topic; I should declare mine: I am an Anglo-Catholic, liturgically on the conservative side and doctrinally more or less aligned with, say, Rowan Williams. As such I have no antipathy towards late mediaeval catholicism as such, and on theological grounds a good deal of criticism to make of the reformers under Edward and Elizabeth. (See, for example, the serious criticisms levelled by Dix against Cranmer and his colleagues, never really rebutted.) Note that Duffy's study is one of life "on the ground", as it were, but one's doctrinal views can influence how one reads the text.

This is carefully researched, though (as is the case with most histories of this sort) individual details may be contested, or at least challenged as not necessarily as ready for generalization as they might be, especially as actual use will have varied considerably in different areas of the country and parish by parish: the late mediaeval world, just beginning to adjust to the printing press, was not a very uniform one. Nevertheless, Duffy's arguments can, I think, be said to represent a position which are, or should be, the default, at least inasmuch as they show (1) that the devotional life of the late mediaeval world was not arid, but lively, and that the observances of the rhythms of the church year were deeply integrated into the life of the community; (2) that the doctrine expressed by the observances of the typical late mediaeval parish (or many late mediaeval parishes) was not some kind of aberration away from the broader tradition of catholic belief; (3) that the English Reformation did considerable harm to the fabric of daily life, especially after its Henrician phase, but beginning even under Henry; (4) that prior at least to the ham-fisted attempts by Mary Tudor to restore the catholic faith there was more sympathy, generally, with the old religion than with the new.

The defaced statues, smashed windows, and ruined rood-screens (however many were a product of this phase of the Reformation and however many of the later depredations of Cromwell's soldiers) are an effective metaphor for the damage to devotional life the book describes.

It lies outside Duffy's scope, but it is worth pointing out that (despite the type of evidence put forward in More and Cross's Anglicanism, drawn largely from the Caroline and Jacobean divines) the overall thrust of the Elizabethan settlement and even more of the final compromise after the Commonwealth was to exclude most of the traits which we would now identify as Catholic within the Anglican Church, downplay many others (bishops were kept but no particularly high doctrine was officially declared for their order), and exclude most of the elements of "the beauty of holiness" which even rather middle-of-the-road parishes used to take for granted as a characteristic of Anglicanism. You could find isolated exceptions, but in general it is true to say that the doctrinal and devotional revivals of the Oxford Movement and the improvement in liturgy and church design which came out of Cambridge a little later were relying on a very thin thread of continuity indeed within the Church of England.

Henry VIII ran amok in the churches.

For Professor Duffy, it seems that any religious practice, no matter how superstitious or bizarre, is a Good Thing. An anti-Protestant polemic strangely unconcerned with the purity or truth of religion.

Micro-history of a village in Reformation England.

It has been said that the Church thinks in terms of centuries and that we may still be in its early days even though that Friday afternoon when the world turned on its Savior seems so long ago. In those 2000 years, 266 (sometimes very) flawed men have been pope. It's a lot to cover in 500 pages, but Eamon Duffy does so masterfully in his fourth edition of his history of the papacy, Saints and Sinners.

A book review, at minimum, should tell whether a book is worth reading. So often a reviewer spends time making common cause with or combatting the the author's arguments that no mention is made of whether the book is well written, well organized, enjoyable, and worth a share of a reader's limited time. Saints and Sinners is all of those.

While the author and this reviewer are Catholic, one need not be a Catholic to enjoy this book. An interest in Western history will suffice as there is certainly no single office which has had such a consistent role in its shaping for so long a time. And the papacy, as an office, and the men who have held it, is what this book is about. Church doctrine and general Church history are not its subjects unless directly affecting the office. One example: the Crusades are barely mentioned other than how only a strong papacy could have willed them into existence in a fractious Europe.

For 2000 years, the men to whom Jesus gave the keys to the kingdom, have striven to perpetuate his Church from age to age. From its earliest days they believed a unity was required - a unity rooted in a successor to Peter at the head of Christ's one Church. A cynic might see in this simply a desire for power. Power against deviants from orthodoxy. And temporal power while awaiting Christ's return. And there is no doubt truth in both of those assertions. But the mission of the Church, from the time of Pentecost, has been to ensure people's eternal souls ultimately end up where they belong: in heaven with their Creator. What may appear as a lust for power can also reasonably be seen as fallen men doing as they see fit to create the most visible, straight path back to Heaven. To the 266 popes, that path is through the Catholic Church.

That is not to say there have not been some reprehensible men elected Pontiff. And a whitewash this is not. Constantine's Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity in the Roman Empire, was a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that it opened the gates to the Church and is no doubt one of the key reasons that Christianity became the dominant faith of Europe. A curse in that it began the intertwining of the Church and politics. And where politics are involved, corruption, greed, and every other vice are not far behind. While the days of European monarchs wielding great authority in papal elections was long over, some still had a veto authority as late as the 1910s. Of course, it cuts both ways: for centuries the popes were kingmakers in whichever European kingdoms were currently under its sway. This unfortunate, and probably inevitable, commingling gave rise to the worst periods of the papacy culminating in the some of history's more notorious characters such as the Alexander VI.

The wave of 19th century political upheaval, and Napoleon specifically, were death knells to the Church's temporal power. And all for the good. Though popes like Leo XIII (1878-1903) and his immediate successors fought it, the breaking of the papal influence on temporal power (including the loss of the Papal States) was the greatest thing to ever happen to the Church. It paved the way for popes exclusively dedicated to its mission without having to operate within the confines of conflicting agreements with different countries, some of which could exert inordinate amounts of influence on the Church's leadership, ability to evangelize, and revenue collection. I do not think it's going to0 far to say that without Napoleon it would be hard to imagine St. John Paul the Great, Benedict XVI, and Francis I becoming pope. The qualifications for election would still have been too concerned with temporal matters when these men were the right age.

2000 years. 266 saints and sinners. All have been both. Some more one than the other. But David had Uriah killed so he could take his wife, Bathsheba. And still he wrote the Psalms. Peter denied even knowing Jesus three times in a span of hours after having walked on water with him. And still he was crucified in Rome after having established his Lord's Church there. God works through men; that is to say sinners. And He does so in the hope that we shall all stumble home and be saints with him in Paradise. However circuitous the route.½

A strong Counter-Reformation polemic: it would be more convincing if this were all we knew. This is brilliant social history but it conveniently stops with 1580, before the Elizabethan Via Media was formed. The author's conclusions give the impression that he is unaware of the efforts of the Anglican Church to save fundamental catholic faith and practice from desecration at the hands of the Puritan Inter-regnum in the 17th century and the efforts of the so-called Oxford Movement to revive the essential catholicity of the Church of England. So, 16th century "Protestantism" becomes the scapegoat for England's loss of "true" piety. Of course, Eamon Duffy knows better than this.

Good balanced overview of the papacy told in an interesting and coherent manner.½

Taken as what it is (more or less notes for a radio show) this is really great. It's kind of a tasting menu of Papal history- not much depth, it won't fill you with Papal knowledge, and sometimes the chapters seem a little free-floating. But then if you want all that, you can read his 'Saints and Sinners' instead. Here Duffy does a good job showing you the pros and cons of most of the popes, although there aren't many cons for John XIII, and you can see he's working really hard to find nice things to say about Pius IX. Method is radio friendly: he takes the one thing a given pope is best known for, tells that story, and moves on. Very well written; it makes me want to re-read S&S, which I probably didn't spend enough time on the first time around.

Pretty well written, really picks up steam the closer it gets to the present- although maybe that's just because I knew less about the more recent history. You won't pick up any ammunition for witch-hunts, but that's okay. Sometimes the best approach is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until you've seen what everyone is doing, and then judging. Read this, you'll know what almost all the popes did, and you can judge them on your own- Duffy refrains.

‘Society is sick... the one hope, the one remedy, is the Pope.’ PIUS X

For almost 2,000 years, the papacy has been among the most influential forces in world history. Popes have created emperors and deposed monarchs, divided the spoils of conquest and plunged nations into war. A living link between the age of the New Testament and the 21st century, today’s Holy Father commands the spiritual allegiance of more than a fifth of the world’s population and attracts greater crowds than presidents and pop stars.

In Saints and Sinners the distinguished historian Eamon Duffy traces the tumultuous processes by which a humble fisherman from Galilee became the foundation and first figurehead of a prodigious institution that has challenged the authority of the mightiest rulers and states, and reached to the heart of culture and society in every era. Duffy follows the story of the papacy from the dying days of the Roman Empire to modern times.

Among the 262 extraordinary men who have led the Catholic Church we encounter the pious and pragmatic Gregory the Great, who initiated the evangelisation of Anglo-Saxon England; Alexander VI, the notorious Borgia Pope; Leo X, whose efforts to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica precipitated the Reformation; Pius XII, diplomat extraordinaire of the Second WorldWar; and John Paul II, whose uncompromisingly traditionalist principles were no barrier to his status as the most popular pope ever.

Our edition of Saints and Sinners uses the most up-to-date version of the text published in 2006. Regarded by critics as the finest single-volume account of the papacy available, this is a historical tour de force – and a magnificent portrait of one of the most powerful and ancient institutions in the world.

‘Everything good, popular history ought to be’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Definitely a good read but may have a bit too much of an axe to grind and a case to make. Revisionist history swings wildly in one direction or another. Still, a useful corrective to those who consider the Marian church a predestined failure.

Good overview of the history of the papacy, and all of its glories and shames made known for all to see. Pictures, tables, and other resources were very helpful with keeping track of everybody.

I read Duffy's excellent book: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 and found it a feast of Reformation History that heretofore was untold and somewhat obscure. This book, Fires of Faith, is more of a Roman Catholic apologetic for intolerance and incompetence wreaked by Mary Tudor's regime, precisely that aspect of her reign that is quite indefensible. Duffy tries to highlight positive attributes of the regime, but is unconvincing at every turn. The grotesque burnings are defended as part of the times and we are asked to consider this as part of a zero sum game between 16th Century Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Maybe so, but this still leaves naked the sheer inanity of the regime; Duffy admits as much in acknowledging that the burnings and circus-like show trials were counter-productive. I should say so. Although alluded to, Mary's morose psychological need for settling scores by acting in a self-destructive manner is never discussed at length. This is important given the evidence of her severely depressed and delusional state. Likewise Duffy ignores the larger historical context, including Mary's extremely unpopular marriage to Philip II (who surreptitiously left the squalid scene posthaste for Spain, never intending to return), the loss of Calais, and Mary's (ironic) tearful and significant fights with Pope Paul IV over his anti-Habsburg policies.

At the end of the book, I felt an amazing sense of relief that Elizabeth I came on the scene and established the Via Media. Her dislike of Mary's religious policies was well known by the public and it was expected that a change would occur when she became Queen. They were correct. Upon her accession, heresy laws were instantaneously repealed and the the burnings ceased, immediately. During Mary's reign one could be reported to the authorities for not fingering Rosary beads. Her intolerance is not to be measured by our standards, I grant you that. However, it should be noted that the great English Church composer, Thomas Tallis, was a Catholic and a Gentleman of Elizabeth's Chapel Royal, until his death. In 1575 Queen Elizabeth granted Tallis and William Byrd (Tallis's pupil and also a Catholic) a monopoly in England on printing music. Yes, Elizabeth I established an ambiguous religious settlement but as long as one did not express the wish to overthrow her (alas, Pope Paul IV made it a sin for Catholics to obey her - Regnans in Excelsis, the papal bull deposing Elizabeth, 1570), you could practice your Catholicism after paying a fine. After reading Duffy's book, the prospect of finding a comparable example of such intelligent and open thinking during Mary's reign is grimly ludicrous.

Got to page 40, and I couldn't go any further. The writing style was far too jumbled and dull. A shame, as this period of history truly fascinates me.