Abstract
This curious collection of essays brings together a selection of 19 reviews and essays. Only one is previously unpublished. Sixteen were first published between 2002 and 2012; the remaining two in 2015 and 2016; 11 appeared first in either the New York or the London Review of Books. Although Duffy has made some effort to bring these reviews up to date, over half the work comprises (extended) reviews of works that appeared nearly a decade – or nearly two decades – ago. They are certainly of interest, but some of these debates have moved on. This is not a collection for those who wish to engage with the cutting edge of scholarship.
What it does offer is a sample of Duffy’s engagement with the material culture of the medieval church. The first section considers books: the use of books, rather than scrolls, in early Christianity; the libraries of the English kings; the Golden Legend, a collection of hagiographies compiled by Jacobus de Voragine in the mid-thirteenth century; the puzzling manuscript Beinecke MS 408, written in no known language; and the use of psalms in the piety of the later medieval period, in particular the psalms made available through Books of Hours. Here, Duffy argues that ‘most people will have prayed the psalms rapidly, without close comprehension of the precise meaning of the Latin’, and rejects the idea that the use of Books of Hours ‘was both the sign and in some sense the cause of a spiritual individualism’ (p. 67). The second section, ‘Crises and movements’, begins with a discussion of plague and historical memory, moving from the plague of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries to the Black Death of the fourteenth. Duffy then turns to the development of liturgical and polyphonic music, in particular the role played by the invention of musical notation, but also the importance of personal contacts in the spread of the new chant. The crusades are considered (under the title ‘holy terror’, despite Duffy’s argument that ‘it is misleading to imagine that the Crusades, so deeply embedded in the thought-patterns and values of their own times, prefigure any sort of twenty-first century sequence of events’ (p. 109)). The history of medieval and early modern childhood is discussed, and here it is very noticeable that this is a contribution to a debate which was current nearly 20 years ago.
‘Saints’, the third section, highlights the importance of relics (Chapters 11 and 12); discusses attitudes towards the Jews, and particularly the origins of the blood libel, which Duffy associates with the murder of William of Norwich in 1144; considers the cults of the seventh-century Saxon bishop St Erkenwald and of the English King Henry VI (murdered on 21 May 1471) and prayer to the Virgin Mary; and makes a strong case for the local nature of much late-medieval pilgrimage. The fourth section, ‘On the eve of the Reformation’, explores first the establishment of Wingfield College in Suffolk as a chantry and the relationships between Crowland (or Croyland) Abbey and the community in which it existed. In the final essays, Duffy turns to art: the depiction of the ‘four Latin doctors’ – Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome – in late-medieval, mainly English, churches and colleges; the impact of the Reformation on the alabaster industry; and the career of the German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, who continued to turn out pictures for Catholic patrons even while he was devising ‘a new pictorial language for Protestantism’ (p. 307).
There are many valuable insights in this wide-ranging collection of essays. The importance of local religion, as well as the materiality of religion, are important emphases. Duffy expresses the hope that these essays will help readers ‘to understand the people of the past through the objects, places, beliefs and practices in which their deepest hopes and fears found expression’ (p. 4). In offering a vivid impression of the sheer variety of lived medieval religion, he has certainly been successful.