What to make of A People's Tragedy, collection of Reformation themed essays by Duffy, which mostly explores how the Reformation has been understood by people in the centuries since? While several of the essays are interesting, they are most likely to be fully enjoyed by various experts. However there are some stand out chapters. Two of these demonstrate Duffy's excellence at exploring the ordinary experience of religion. The first, on the nature and experience, of pilgrimage before the Reformation gives, like Voices of Morebath, a real flavour of ordinary lives. Here are the ordinary pilgrims, "goggling" at the splendour around them, distracting them from the shrine. The second, which looks at the doomed, pro-Catholic, rebellion of 1569, again demonstrates what I argue is the essence of the Reformation for "history from below". In England it was experienced by most people as an assault on their culture and community, from above - and thus rebellions against it must be seen as resistance to attacks on ordinary people - rather than just a defence of Catholic practice.
Other essays look in detail at how different historians, religious figures and so on have discussed and understood the Reformation. Some of these are obscure to non-specialists. Others less so. There is a fascinating chapter that dissects Hilary Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. Exploring how the author reverses the character and behaviours of two key figures - Cromwell and Thomas More, to the detriment, Duffy argues of popular understanding of the English Reformation. While the main thrust of the argument is understandable, Duffy's desire to protect the legacy of Thomas More seems more sectarian than historical. Another fascinating chapter looks at the development of the English Bible, and its impact today.
To be fair to Duffy, he is concerned not just with pushing a more pro-Catholic viewpoint on the Reformation than most readers will be used to, but in actually exploring the legacy of the schism itself. This, he argues, was quite negative. Regarding the end of the tradition of pilgrimage, Duffy concludes that with its end, "English imagination was the poorer for it". While it is certainly true that the infrastructure and fabric of churches suffered from the consequences, was collective "imagination" really that damaged? Me thinks the writer protests too much.
Part of the problem is that Duffy is concerned about religion per se. This is particularly notable in his chapter on the rise, fall and rise again of pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. Here, in his account of contemporary politics of the event, he is keen to stress the unity of the wings of the Church, over and above the nature of the pilgrimage itself. What does pilgrimage mean in the 21st century is not really a question that Duffy tries to answer. This, I think is important, because Duffy has disconnected his religion(s) from wider economic, political and dare I say it, historical processes. Sometimes this is obvious on a specific level - for instance in the account of 1569 (a revolt entirely neglected by contemporary left historians) Duffy writes:
Till relatively recently, historians have been inclined to explain the rebellion in essentially secular terms, as the last gasp of northern feudalism, an attempt by northern grandees, resentful of their own exclusion from the corridors of power and the domination of the Elizabethan court.
Duffy, instead, reminds us that people did (at all sorts of levels in society) enthusiastically embrace the opportunity to reassert their own religion and practice in the old way: Digging up altar stones, teaching choirboys to sing the old songs and so on. But what Duffy misses is that the revolt can be understood as both aspects. Indeed it is both the desire for northern power and the desire to worship in the old ways that provided the impetuous for revolt by elite rebels and the space for some of the masses to support them.
It is Duffy's ability to disconnect religion from context (while recognising its centrality to the lives of ordinary people) that makes the book a frustrating read. Duffy might be keen to build bridges between the different Christian Churches and to argue against viewpoints that sometimes place Protestantism and being automatically more progressive than Catholicism. But this is abstract religion - there's nothing really here about the role of religion in the modern world, or indeed how a unity of purpose for different Christians might impact on wider politics. Given the uses and abuses to which religion is being purposed in the modern world, particularly by the right and far-right, its a shame that Duffy's excellent historical analysis of the Reformation as a religious process cannot be deployed in ways that might illuminate contemporary politics.
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