I just got hold of Eamon Duffy’s latest book Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (Just published in Britain, and due out in the US in August). Duffy is a wonderful historian whose 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 was a staggering evocation of the religious life of Pre-Reformation England, and a grim account of how this was all swept away from the 1530s onwards. While generations of Protestants have believed that the Catholic Church in 1500 (say) was irredeemably corrupt and widely hated, Duffy shows its remarkable vigor and popularity. Instead of being a closed and arcane business for clergy alone, church life involved virtually every lay person, through a complex network of fraternities and devotional societies. Destroying that structure took a couple of generations, and a great deal of state-directed armed violence, mainly motivated by royal and aristocratic greed. After reading Duffy, you will never again accept without question the standard mythology of the Reformation – in Britain at least – as a spontaneous popular revolution. It was a vast act of political and cultural repression and plunder, inflicted by a cynical elite, which may or may not have accepted the new theologies. Duffy’s other recent work includes The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village.
When we think of the Reformation in terms of Luther and the church door, it’s salutary to think of some very different images that reflect how the revolution affected everyday people. Duffy reports one incident that occurred in 1549, when the up and coming landowner Walter Raleigh was riding through a Devonshire village (this was the father of the famous explorer). Seeing an old woman carrying her rosary beads, he ordered her to get rid of them immediately under threat of criminal penalty. The woman told her neighbors that “except she would leave her beads and give over holy bread and water the gentleman would burn them out of their houses and spoil them”. The enraged people rioted, almost lynching Raleigh, and order was restored only when the forces of the state “ruthlessly butchered” the villagers. Liberty of conscience is a wondrous thing.
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