Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 by Eamon Duffy, and: Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations by Eamon Duffy

Abstract

203 Book review not to explicitly situate this work in the realm of liturgical scholarship . What he did intend was to “aid the reader to discover the face of God in liturgical worship” (xvi). To this end, Fr. Chupungco has left his readers a valuable gift. Leonard J. DeLorenzo University of Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana Eamon Duffy Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2011 xiv+202 pages. Paperback. $25.00. Eamon Duffy Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012 viii+311 pages. Hardbound. $29.95. Eamon Duffy has established himself as one of the foremost historians of Christianity and, especially, of the religious history of Tudor England. In The Stripping of the Altars, first published in 1992 and now in its second edition (Yale University Press, 2005), Duffy argued persuasively on behalf of the health and vitality of late medieval Christianity in England, challenging the received interpretation that a decrepit, stagnant and moribund Catholic practice laid the foundation for the rebirth of (a more authentic) Christian piety in the Reformation. Such a view believes that King Henry VIII and his successors merely gave official impetus to the yearning for reform that was latent in late medieval England . In Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition and Marking the Hours Duffy returns to this terrain and brings more evidence to show just how vibrant religious devotion was in late medieval England and how slow, complex and torturous was the eventual success of the Reformation . Both of these volumes, but especially Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition, can be seen as companion pieces to The Stripping of the Altars. Indeed, that magisterial treatment of late medieval English Christianity provides the background for many of the topics that Duffy treats in Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition. Consequently, like a 204 Antiphon 18.2 (2014) great epic poem, it seems that this volume begins in medias res, the reader’s knowledge of the argument of The Stripping of the Altars and its critical reception being presupposed. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is in many ways Duffy’s response to his critics. He clearly bristles at the suggestion that he is a mere “Catholic revisionist historian,” and in the first part of the book (including the Introduction and first two chapters), he provides a wonderful survey of the historiography surrounding the English Reformation to show his autonomy from confessional allegiances and defend his argument. Duffy admits , as he had already said in the Introduction to the second edition , “that The Stripping of the Altars was a self-consciously polemical work” (4). This does not mean, however, that Duffy intended it as a work of Catholic propaganda. His survey of the justifications for, and interpretations of, the success of the Reformation shows that if he is to be accused of “revisionism,” then his critics, defenders of the established and heretofore authoritative view, must acknowledge that their conception has a rather striking affinity to positions developed in the polemical debates that erupted along confessional lines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition is not a conventional narrative history—so much in vogue these days—in which Duffy attempts to re-present and re-argue the story of the English Reformation. Rather, he deepens and solidifies the argument of The Stripping of the Altars. The reader gets the sense that Duffy gathered much of the material that is included in this volume from the “cutting room floor.” The book contains eleven chapters that are arranged in four parts. Duffy characterizes these chapters as “essays,” and, although each could exist as an independent article, there is an overarching unity to the volume. His goal is to “illuminate one aspect or another of the fraught and highly confessionalized history of religion in Tudor England” (13). Once again he wants to show the vibrant place that religion held in late medieval English society. To this end he presents evidence for the importance of Catholic Christianity among both lay people and intellectual elites (e.g., Cardinals Fisher and Pole) in order to give a unified picture of religion in Tudor England. One gets the sense that in...