Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Part 1)

I've always considered Eamon Duffy's work to be nigh on infallible and his humour always impeccable. Few can argue that the subject matter of Duffy's recent opus Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Yale University Press, 2009) could ever be described as humourous. Duffy is acutely aware of the current global climate and naturally opens himself up to accusations of cold heartedness and a lack of compassion. An historian is not a novelist and I think, having finished the book, Duffy doesw well to avoid the bloody coating that has oozed through centuries of ecclesiastical historiography. Historical understanding is not enhanced by an endless debate as to who suffered most.

As a triumvirate of works, with, The Stripping of the Altars and, The Vicar Morepath, Professor Duffy has done more to attack the monolithic A.G. Dicken's classical text, The English Reformation (London, 1964) which, despite being written in the swinging sixties, was little more than the academic equiavlent to three centuries of Whig domination of British history, than any scholar in the past forty-five years.

I was frankly suprised by the range of reviews. No-one expected Duffy to be able to publish anything without considerable attention and critical analysis. That is the measure of the man. However, the hostility evoked by the book came from the most unlikely of sources (more to follow).

I was most suprised by David Starkey's review in The Sunday Times (14 June 2009):

Eamon Duffy is a 62-year-old Irish "cradle Catholic" who, as professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge, has made it his business to force the English to think again about the central event in their history, the Protestant Reformation. Did the Reformation take place, as Protestants claimed, because the Catholic Church was rotten within, and overwhelmed from without by the new doctrine? Or was it simply, as Catholics argued, that Henry VIII fell in lust with Anne Boleyn and, because he couldn't have his way, broke with Rome?

Copyright - The Times

The beauty about Starkey's analysis of Fires of Faith is that it is one of the few that takes the work and places it soundly with the context of its rightful historiography - as a piece of analytical historical research and without the confessionalism that has plagued English ecclesiastical history since the Reformation. That is Starkey's most attractive point - he's not anti-Catholic, he's anti-God.

I shall not give away too much from the book as it's worth buying for yourselves: Pole looms large, Mary doesn't and at times the work is chillingly uncompassionate... as all good history should be. For example, citing Starkey again:

[T]this is the nub of the book, the burning - all 284 of them - worked. There is no evidence, Duffy claims, that public sympathy was on the side of the heretics. If the burnings tailed off towards the end of Mary's reign, it was not because of any failure of nerve but because the supply of victimes was getting exhausted.

To read the full review of Starkey click here.