Reformation Divided. Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England

Eamon Duffy

Bloomsbury, £30

Review by Jonathan Wright

THE very term "Reformation" is, for Eamon Duffy, "an unsatisfactory designation concealing a battery of value judgements." It carries the "implication that a 'good' form of Christianity replaced a 'bad' one" during the 16th century. As many historians, not least Duffy, have demonstrated in recent decades, however, late medieval Christendom was not nearly as feeble or corrupt as we'd always been led to believe. The doctrinal and ecclesiological landscapes were far from perfect (when had they ever been?) but there was devotional gusto aplenty and Protestantism's triumph, especially in Britain, was never inevitable.

The other problem with "Reformation" is that it can easily become a neat-and-tidy umbrella term for a staggeringly diverse range of phenomena. Protestants, as Duffy writes, were "profoundly, often murderously, divided among themselves" and the era was defined by endless grumbling about all the internecine strife. By the mid-17th century, for instance, the Protestant Thomas Edwards was more than happy to celebrate the spurning of Roman authority: "You have made a Reformation," he wrote, "and blessed be God who put it in your heads to do such a thing." But there had been a hefty price to pay in terms of all the ensuing sects and heretical offshoots: "with the Reformation have we not a Deformation, and worse things come in upon us than ever we had before?"

Here, as in many of his writings, Duffy's portrayal of the late medieval Church, while a necessary corrective, can become a little too rosy. One occasionally wonders why, if all was set so fair, Protestantism managed to have such a devastating impact. Reformation success was often slow to materialise in Britain but, as various so-called post-revisionist scholars have argued, the ideas of Luther, Calvin, et al did actually hold popular appeal in some quarters from quite early on. Duffy's contribution has been momentous, however, since it reminds us of how muddled the era's religious trajectories were and because it does not dismiss Catholicism as a moribund faith that simply reacted, panic-stricken, to 16-century events.

The best of Duffy is on display in this volume. Most of the chapters are reworkings of articles published in specialist journals but he has supplied fresh linking passages and moulded the earlier essays into a genuinely coherent whole. A first section, focusing on Thomas More's encounter with religious change, will hopefully banish all the silly theories about the roots of More's campaign against Protestantism. He may have written bitter words and encouraged savage deeds, but this stemmed from profound theological objections rather than some variety of sadistically-manifested sexual repression! Duffy does not see More as a happy-go-lucky Humanist who lost his way and morphed into a cruel monster, but as a man who, for all the later biliousness, can at least lay claim to intellectual consistency.

The tempestuous journey of More's beloved Church later in the century is ably explored in the book's middle section through a series of biographically-oriented chapters. We meet Reginald Pole who, as papal legate under Mary Tudor, managed to bring true dynamism to the cause of Catholic restoration: emblematic of a reign too often dismissed, with the benefit of hindsight, as a misguided blip. We find William Allen training up priests, founding exile colleges, and pouring scorn on the regime's penchant for persecuting Catholics on the grounds of political disloyalty. A little rich, that last point, since Allen was perfectly happy to indulge in plotting and would have welcomed the military overthrow of Elizabeth I. And how wonderful to see the prolific Gregory Martin being showered with praise. The theological scope of Martin's tracts was impressive but he also made his points with literary panache. Martin is grossly neglected which, as Duffy suggests, speaks to a larger issue of English Catholicism being "thought of as in some way incidental to the history of Elizabethan culture." Until recently, figures like Martin were "marginalised or excluded altogether from the canon of significant Elizabethan writing."

The Catholic community remains the focus in the remainder of part two, which includes a thoughtful reflection on how Catholics prayed during such difficult decades. Contemporary crises could hardly be ignored, but by mining the Church's spiritual tradition the faithful were "encouraged to think of themselves as stepping into a stream that ran back into a time when there had been no Protestants." There was "no need for a hermeneutic of rupture." Equally fascinating is Duffy's wide-ranging account of how Catholic historians attempted to conceptualise the Reformation. Starting with the likes of Nicholas Sander in the 16th century, Duffy travels all the way through to John Lingard in the 19th and laments that his ten-volume history of England "moulders now on the shelves of second-hand bookshops" while you can snap up a very nice set on the internet "for a good deal less than the value of the leather binding."

Protestants take centre stage in a final section which explores, inter alia, the thorny issue of defining the role of a reformed minister and the problems of inherently elitist denominations (big on literacy; geared towards a minority bound for salvation, etc) coping with the reprobate multitude. The remarkable thing is that Duffy manages to make a satisfying panorama out of these vignettes and, with so many opportunistic blockbuster histories of the Reformation flooding from the presses this year, it's nice to be reminded that a lifetime of specialised, painstaking scholarship often adds up to a bigger and far more rewarding picture.