Abstract
Eamon Duffy’s career in London and Cambridge and in the media has given Catholicism a prominent place in Britain’s intellectual circles. His career began with doctoral research on Joseph Berington, a liberal secular priest of the late-18th century, before he published on 18th-century English Catholicism. Eventually, he settled into the late medieval and Tudor period where he has remained, attracted by its continuing controversial polarities. Having adopted the role of a champion of a revisionism which provides English Catholicism with a timely response to the traditional preponderant Protestant Reformation myths, he published the widely acclaimed The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and The Voices of Morebath (2001), before concentrating on a rehabilitation of Mary Tudor’s reign. Since his retirement, he has begun to publish collections of his shorter works, of which this volume forms part. A People’s Tragedy will be attractive to the non-specialist reader who will welcome not only the short chapters and carefully chosen plates but also Duffy’s robust and fluent style that beckons the reader to come alongside him and share his enjoyment of debate. Colour is provided by his fascination with the foibles of individuals, some of whom deserve to be better known. The dominant objective in these essays is to rescue the Tudor period from being interpreted through an English Protestant national consciousness by supplying evidence in two parts, covering a thriving late medieval Catholic faith and a vital and enduring Catholicism. Moving swiftly from medieval pilgrimages to cathedrals, with an ingenious attempt to gauge pilgrim numbers through an analysis of receipts at two cathedrals, Duffy returns to a traditional Catholic view that the Rising of the North in 1569 had principally a religious motive and was not simply a secular ‘last gasp of northern feudalism’. A useful overview of the founding of the English College at Douai in French Flanders in 1568 follows. Duffy indicates that Douai had close links with England, but omits mentioning the medieval wool trade being one of them. To leaven his Catholic stuffing, he then moves on to discuss the literary artistry of the Anglican King James Bible, showing the Bible to be a co-operative effort and its language ‘deliberately stately and archaic’. Aware that religious autobiography was fashionable in the 17th century, Duffy introduces the quaint self-reflections of the moderate Puritan, Richard Baxter, hoping to make him better known to a modern readership. Duffy begins Part 2 by evaluating a series of 19th and 20th Catholic reactions to Luther to show how early malign Catholic attacks on him were later transformed into an appreciation, by theologians like Joseph Ratzinger, that some of his key teachings were compatible with Catholic doctrine, and thus prepared the ground for the Joint Declaration on Justification in 2016. Duffy’s attempt to rehabilitate the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor is partly behind his chapter that criticises the Victorian historian J. A. Froude, although he remains impressed by the latter’s dependence on primary archival sources. He rejects Froude’s central theme that the Reformation was a necessary step towards the emergence of a Protestant nation, and he couples the 20th-century historian A. G. Dickens with Froude, since Dickens argued, unjustifiably according to Duffy, that bankrupt late medieval Christianity was replaced by a biblical Protestantism. The story of the restoration of Marian Walsingham, in the following chapter, with its setbacks and successes, helps to balance Dickens’ prognostication. Duffy, however, saves his thunder for his final chapter, ‘Fiction and fact’, where he forensically demolishes much of the fiction which claims to be fact in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about the Reformation and which forms a published postscript to his earlier attack on Mantel in the Times Literary Supplement (13 November 2020). While admitting to the author’s painstaking research and her engaging literary style, he admonishes the author for skirting around the value of the recent Catholic revisionist version of the Reformation, of which he himself is a standard-bearer, and returning instead to the jaded Protestant Reformation myth. Duffy believes Mantel unfairly demonises Thomas More. Doubtless he now awaits an iconoclastic response to his idolatrous papistry.