Peter Marshall
Reformation Blues
The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome
By G W Bernard
Yale University Press 304pp £25 order from our bookshop
Those of us who write or teach about the English Reformation have for some years now been wrestling with a problem variously termed the ‘revisionist dilemma’ or the ‘compliance conundrum’. Basically, explaining the success of the Reformation, and the relative lack of popular resistance to it, used to be straightforward, when the terms of reference were those of the Reformation’s own Protestant inheritance: the Church was deeply corrupt, its clergy unpopular with the laity, and its teachings largely obscure and alienating. But in the last quarter of a century or so, a silver-tongued syndicate of influential scholarship, usually termed ‘revisionist’, has torn up and rewritten the script. In the light of Eamon Duffy’s epoch-defining study of ‘traditional religion’, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), the late medieval Church appears to have been flourishing rather than in decline in the century before the break with Rome, confident and effective in its articulation of the faith, and deeply responsive to popular needs. Hence the problem: if everything in the garden was so rosy, why the riot of uprooting and replanting that took place in the sixteenth century?
G W Bernard, recent biographer of Anne Boleyn and author of The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church, takes the matter in hand. The Late Medieval English Church does not quite bill itself as an extended commentary on Duffy’s work, but that is the clear
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/