Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England

by Eamon Duffy

Professor Eamon Duffy represents that rare phenomenon - a major Reformation historian who commands a wide general readership. He is a man with a passion to communicate. It was Duffy`s landmark book The Stripping of the Altars (Yale UP) which completely revolutionized reformation studies in the Anglo Saxon world. Far from being 'clean cut' Duffy argued and demonstrated that the reformation process was far more complex and England most certainly did not become protestant over night.

Published to mark 500 years since the Reformation in England (1517), this book is also in a sense a follow up to Duffy's book Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition (Bloomsbury Continuum). Reformation Divided falls neatly into three sections: Thomas More and Heresy; The Counter Reformation and the Conversion of England and Reformation Divided: The Godly and the Conversion of England. Duffy examines the reaction of major Catholic thinkers like Thomas More to the reformation, how the Catholic Church responded to the protestant reformation with its own reformation and how the English protestant reformation followed its course under Elizabeth and the continuing puritan tradition.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology, Catholic, European History, Christianity

256 pages, Hardcover

Published February 23, 2017

About the author

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College.

He describes himself as a "cradle Catholic" and specializes in 15th to 17th century religious history of Britain. His work has done much to overturn the popular image of late-medieval Catholicism in England as moribund, and instead presents it as a vibrant cultural force. On weekdays from 22nd October to 2nd November 2007, he presented the BBC Radio 4 series "10 Popes Who Shook the World" - those popes featured were Peter, Leo I, Gregory I, Gregory VII, Innocent III, Paul III, Pius IX, Pius XII, John XXIII, and John Paul II.

Reviews

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure what Duffy is trying to do with this one. It begins as an examination of a couple of the major personalities of the counter-reformation in England and moves on towards a more general overview of the English Catholicism of the period. The title, the introduction, and the actual content of the book appear to be doing different jobs. While I do appreciate Duffy's attempt to rescue Catholicism from its Protestant detractors in history (even if he does stretch it a bit in his partisan zeal), this book feels less like a major contribution and more like a place to stick research that didn't make it into his other works. That said, I thought his chapter on the conflicts between secular clergy and monastic houses was excellent.

[Toby · Rating 2 out of 5]

With this collection of essays Eamon Duffy takes us into the byways and backwaters of the Reformation (the Reformation in this instance extending into the early Eighteenth Century). This means that for most readers of the book, the information and stories contained within will be only scantily known. This may be a good or a bad thing. Overall I found my concentration struggled with substantial parts of the book as I simply wasn't interested enough in what he had to say.

The book is in three parts. Part 1 is a discussion of Thomas More and humanism, which is well-written and enlightening. Duffy tries to take on Hilary Mantel's brutal portrait of More and return More to the sensitive humanist that previous generations saw him as, rather than the sexually troubled torturer. He recognises that this task might be a vain one.

Part 2, which I struggled with, is made up of a number of chapters on recusancy, the priestly mission to England and the college at Douai. At times it felt repetitive and there simply wasn't enough there to engage me.

Part 3 takes us beyond the sixteenth century reformation into the world of Richard Baxter and George Fox. This was much more interesting and I would have enjoyed more on them, although we are now out of Duffy's main area of expertise.

In short, this volume feels like a counter punch to Diarmaid MacCulloch's selection of essays "All Things New" published the year before, but MacCulloch writes with more verve and his subjects (to me, at least) were of more interest. I suspect this volume has been published by a mainstream publisher purely on the strength of the author's name. I couldn't imagine such an esoteric selection of essays being published by Bloomsbury otherwise.