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In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about. Tracing the fraught history of religious change in Tudor England, and the retellings of that history to shape a protestant national identity, once again he emphasizes the importance of the study of late medieval religion and material culture for our understanding of this most formative and fascinating of eras. Getting to grips with the misconceptions, discontinuities and dilemmas which have dogged the history of Tudor religion, he traces the lived experience of Catholicism in an age of upheaval: from what it meant to be a Catholic in early Tudor England; through the nature of militant Catholicism at the height of the conflict; to the after-life of Tudor Catholicism and the ways in which the 'old religion' was remembered and spoken about in the England of Shakespeare. Duffy writes at all times with grace, elegance and wit as he questions prejudices and myths about the Reformation, to demonstrate that the truth about the past is never pure nor simple.
List of contents
List of Plates and Figures
Part I: Reformation Unravelled
Introduction
1. Reformation, Counter-reformation and the English nation
2. Reformation Unravelled: Facts and Fictions
Part II: The Material Culture of Early Tudor Catholicism
3. The Parish, Piety and Patronage: the Evidence of Roodscreens
4. Salle Church and the Reformation
5. The End of It All: Medieval Church Goods and the 1552 Confiscations
Part III: Two Cardinals
6. John Fisher and the Spirit of his Age
7. The Religion of John Fisher
8. Rome and Catholicity in mid-Tudor England
9. Cardinal Pole and Archbishop Cranmer
Part IV: Catholic Voices
10. The Conservative Voice in the English Reformation
11. Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's England
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
About the author
Professor Eamon Duffy is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. He is the author of The Stripping of the Altars, Reformation Divided and Royal Books and Holy Bones and appears regularly on radio and television as an authority on religion and the Reformation in England.
Summary
Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about, remembered and retold.
Foreword
In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of English Reformation history, including a study of Late Medieval religion and society.
