Early English Orthodoxies: Reading the English Reformations

Abstract

The past two decades have seen a series of studies of late medieval and Early Modern heresy, reform, and orthodoxy, many of which challenge long-held narratives of cultural and religious change and supersession. At the vanguard of these reassessments, Eamon Duffy’s 1992 revisionist history of reformation England, The Stripping of the Altars, argued that because the late medieval English church “had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay,” the Reformation came as a “violent disruption” of the period’s robust religion.1 But many scholars found Duffy to insist rather too strongly on a narrative of cultural rupture and change, noting his scant consideration of late medieval religious controversy and dissent. In a lengthy review of Duffy’s book, David Aers argued that Duffy’s emphasis on the vitality of “traditional religion” in late medieval England obscured the reality of heterodox sects in the century before the Reformation.2 Subsequent considerations of early English religious cultures have continued to echo many of the same themes. More recently James Simpson and others have sought to recover a sense of the vibrantly “reformist” sensibilities and aesthetics of late medieval England, lamenting the destruction resulting from “revolutionary” tendencies, while also decrying scholarly tendencies to find a heretic under every late medieval bush.3 Still others