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Eamon
Duffy
FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR New Haven. Yale University Press. 2009. xiv. 249 pp. ISBN: 0300152167 reviewed by Patrick Killough I. biblio: http://www.biblio.com/books/266510129.html =--=-=-=-=----- II. bn.com 12/20/2009 review title: Five Roman Catholic Years in England: 1553 - 1558 rating: * * * * review: Professor Eamon Duffy's FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR looks popular but is not. A colorful dust jacket contrasts a Catholic Corpus Christi procession with burning of Protestant books. Aids to the general reader include 30 plates, many in color and six maps (e.g. Map 6. "Executions in the Dioceses of Canterbury, Chichester and Rochester 1557-8"). The book also boasts extensive notes, a select bibliography and an index. So far, so good for the general reader.
But the topic, the reign of Catholic Queen Mary Tudor, ruler of England, Wales and Ireland 1553 - 1558) has been treated as a backwater by historians for over 400 years. Mary brought Catholicism back to England for five years, till her death by cancer. Her half-sister Elizabeth then turned her back on the papacy and created the established Protestant Episcopal faith that dominated England into the late 19th Century. The victors write history and Mary's Catholicism lost. So, to be popular, the telling of the Catholic activities of her reign requires spritely writing, some imaginative speculation and above all an executive summary. And all are lacking. Moreover, contemporary documents are quoted in their original 16th Century spelling -- which makes FIRES OF FAITH slower to read (for me at least) than a Sir Walter Scott novel with lots of Broad Lowland Scots. Here next is a sample of Duffy's narrating.
Persons suspected of heresy in heavily Protestant areas were required "to
report anyone refusing to wear rosary beads or not participating in
ceremonies. In such places every adult was required to go for
confession to the parish priest twice during Lent, and then 'to receave
the Sacramente wekelie as the howseholdes shall be appointed.' One
adult member of every household was also required to take part in the
processions and litany on Wednesdays and Fridays. Men known to have
good voices and to have sung in church in King Edward's reign were
listed and required to join the parish choir at Mass, and other
services" (Ch. 6, p 133).
Duffy claims to be one of a handful of historians seeking to do justice to Mary's reign. He believes that, despite hundreds of burning of heretics at the stake, England was going steadily Catholic by Mary's death. It would have continued so, he argues, had she lived another ten or twenty years. Her right hand man and royal cousin Cardinal Archbishop Reginald Pole was the right man for his job. Despite other historians' beliefs to the contrary, Pole both preached himself and vigorously promoted preaching and teaching. He demanded an educated clergy. Bishops and higher clergy were to be trained theologians of exemplary lives and devoted to the lay faithful. To that end he created new-model seminaries. Catholic publications abounded during the five Marian years: in Latin and English. They were polemical, devotional, liturgy handbooks and broadsides. This book is for you if you are well read in Tudor England from the dynasty's founder Henry VII to its last of five exemplars, Queen Elizabeth I. Its brilliantly reproduced portraits and paintings will hold you. But you will also have your nose rubbed into seemingly endlessly repeated burnings at the stake and dry arguments among historians whether and to what extent burnings helped Catholic restoration in England. -OOO- http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fires-of-Faith/Eamon-Duffy/ e/9780300152166/?itm=1&usri=eamon+duffy++fires+of+faith =-=-=-=- III. amazon.com 12/21/2009 review title: Queen of England "Bloody Mary" was better than her enemies made her out to be reviewer's rating: * * * * review: I am 74 years old and a cradle Roman Catholic. Growing up in passionately Protestant Shreveport, I wept when I read in high school my first book about Queen Mary Tudor, her husband King Philip II of Spain and their effort to win England, Ireland and Wales back to fealty to the Pope. I thought that they should have won -- for the Greater Glory of God. I am not a professional historian (my working career was in American diplomacy). But I think I am part of precisely the non-professional part of Eamon Duffy's readership he meant to pitch his book toward. As the decades have rolled along I have read much in the religious history of England, Ireland and Scotland but did not return to Queen Mary's reign (1553 - 1558) until I read a review of Eamon Duffy's FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. I then bought the book, learned a few new facts, vastly enjoyed the book's 30 plates and six maps. At first glance, it seemed to have all the trappings of a good, solid, readable, reasonably popular history book useful to educated publics who are not specialized in Tudor times or the English Reformation. It had a "Select" Bibliography -- often a sign that the author is writing for non-specialists. The notes were ample but not overwhelming. So I settled back for a good read. By book's end, however, I was greatly disappointed in FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. It was nothing like as readable as Duffy's earlier THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS (under Mary's father King Henry VIII). It was largely a polemic against other historians specialized in the history of the Reformation in England. To his credit, Cambridge University Professor Eamon Duffy was frank about his limited objectives. -- (1) He was trying to dig beneath a huge mound solid as concrete: 400 and more years of historical misinterpretation and supercilious bad-mouthing of Queen Mary (1516 - 1558) and her right hand clergyman and Royal Plantagenet cousin Cardinal Archbishop Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558). Duffy had to dispose of the classical, widely accepted misrepresentations before he could reassess the Marian lustrum in its own lights. -- (2) That project, it seemed to me, meant that FIRES OF FAITH are a work distinctly preliminary to something yet to come and notably more readable. Duffy says as much: he is not writing a biography of Queen Mary or of Cardinal Pole. There are many aspects of Mary's reign he will not touch in any depth: restoration of the monasteries and such like. The book is focused. Its theme is an aspect or two of the re-Catholicization of England, how well it was planned and executed and how it might have succeeded but for the Queen's dying at a relatively young age. Within those limitations Duffy might have written a more readable book except for one unavoidable hurdle: the execution by burning of more than 280 Englishmen and Englishwomen whose consciences did not allow them to profess Mary's and Pole's Roman Catholicism. Modern readers are not likely to see much good in Mary's reign were an author to sweep those executions under a rug. And Duffy does not. Page after page he recounts the hunts for heretics, the trials, the efforts to persuade dissidents to come back to Roman and Royal obedience and the final moments of the Protestant martyrs. A dozen of those anti-Protestant processes and executions are shown in color. Duffy can never get away from those burnings. Their honest narrative takes up a sizeable portion of his text. He tries to show religious persecutions and executions for heresy as not uncommon in other countries at the same time -- though the methods of killing varied. Duffy also argues that the Marian regime and Cardinal Pole were sensitive to the need to justify the persecutions for conscience both to the English people at large and to fellow Europeans. The executions were drawn heavily from the Protestant south and midlands and did not touch large, more religiously conservative parts of England. During executions the appointed preachers made a point of stressing the anarchical character of the faith professions of those to be executed. If a dozen were about to die, there might be ten contradictory interpretations of sacraments or rites among them. Your Protestant, logically, was each man a church or a religion unto himself, the preachers argued. The official apologetics of the Marian years also stressed that Catholic England had been created and sustained by Bishops of Rome dead and gone for many centuries. To cast off the Pope was, therefore, to tear out England's heart and to disrespect one's Catholic parents, grandparents and forebears. Much of that argument stuck. Where only one bishop, Saint John Fisher, had remained papist when Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, by striking contrast, only one bishop, Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff, did NOT stay papist when Mary's successor, her half sister Elizabeth Tudor, peacefully ascended the throne in November 1558. In a rare outburst of color, author Duffy described Bishop Kitchin as "one classic timeserver who would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, provided he was allowed to hold on to the See of Llandaff" (Ch.1, p. 23). Duffy argues that the way Mary and Pole returned, if only briefly, England, Ireland and Wales to official unity with Papal Rome was much studied, admired and copied on the European continent. This is especially true of Pole's insistence on a well educated, pastorally inclined clergy, formally educated in seminaries and universities. This book, as written, cries out for an executive summary. It is not likely to be widely read outside narrow scholarly circles. And even there it may be wrongly discounted because historians simply despise "Bloody Mary" Tudor as a Hitler before Hitler. Duffy's book is not a failure, but it might have been better edited. I rate it 3.5 stars, rounding upward to four * * * *. -OOO- 12/27/2009 in reply to a reader's comment, TPK later wrote: Thanks much for commenting! I did not "overlook" Duffy's having expanded his lectures into a book. I thought about it and didn't think it all that relevant. As is the case with both Frank Turner's JOHN HENRY NEWMAN and Fawn M. Brodie's JOSEPH SMITH bio, I have to concede, pace reverentia vestra, that Duffy presented contemporary views of Mary from both sides. In other words, he was omni-directional in witness selection, to some extent. I just do not think he did a very good job in the amount or the balance of his selections. On balance, his book does not grow on me. I do not want to read it again. But when I return to NC in a week after Christmasing in Texas, I expect to find awaiting me one of the REGINALD POLE bios flagged by Duffy. By coincidence, I watched a biopic DVD yesterday, THE MADNESS OF HENRY THE EIGHTH. Filmed in Romania! If memory serves, the commentator (who made much of Bishop John Fisher, but said nary a word about Thomas More) said that at King's horrible end, his contemporaries credited Henry Tudor with 70,000 deaths on his conscience. He was executing Catholics for treason and Lutherans for heresy, with over 200 burnings (again, from memory). Cruel executions characterized at least three Tudors that I can think of. I am glad that Duffy and others are looking into Mary's reign. I learned some new things and look forward to the better book inside the good professor in that I suspect is crying to leap out. Cordially, TPK http://www.amazon.com/Fires-Faith-Catholic-England-under/dp/0300152167 /ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260021188&sr=1-1 ===-=-==-=-=-= IV. epinions.com 12/21/2009 review title: Queen "Bloody Mary" and Cardinal Pole did some things right RATING: **** Pros: Thirty tables: gorgeous portraits. Six maps. A scholarly book with a nod toward general readers. Cons: By an historian of religion for his academic peers. Lacks an executive summary. Overly detailed. The Bottom Line: If you know about 1553 - 1558 and Queen Mary Tudor's efforts to bring England back to Rome, then read FIRES OF FAITH. Otherwise, think twice. aohcapablanca's Full Review: A wee historical prolog: Between 1485 and 1603 five members of the Welsh House of Tudor ruled England, Wales and Ireland -- but not Scotland. They were Henry VII (Welsh: Harri Tudur), his second son Henry VIII, Henry's only legitimate son Edward VI, Henry's daughter Mary, and Henry's daughter Elizabeth. Henry VII was Roman Catholic. Henry VIII began Catholic but, with Parliament's consent, had by 1534 overthrown the Pope's religious authority in England. Edward was crowned King at age nine and died young in 1553. He was Protestant, much influenced by his half-sister Elizabeth. Edward's adult Protectors went far beyond the reforms of Henry VIII in driving England's established religion towards the radical Reformation. Mary was staunchly Roman Catholic and ruled 1553 - 1558. Elizabeth proved more radically Protestant than her father, but less so than her brother Edward. On Elizabeth's death in 1603, the Calvinist son of her Catholic rival Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the English throne as King James I. Cambridge University Professor Eamon Duffy's FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR looks deceptively popular. By that I mean: suppose that you first saw its dust jacket (reproducing a book burning above a Corpus Christi religious procession) on display in a bookstore. On the spot, were you then to glance hastily through its 30 tables, six maps, table of contents of its nine chapters, dipped here and there into its notes and the book's "select" bibliography, you would likely think it an easy, informative read. And then, if you are like me, you would buy the book, take it home, read it -- and be disappointed. Why? -- First, because you might have digested
earlier a better, more readable book by the same author: THE STRIPPING
OF THE ALTARS -- about Henry VIII's closing and despoiling the riches
of the Catholic monasteries and convents of England.
-- Second, because the book proves to be part of a highly specialized, at times waspish, navel-gazing quarrel among historians over whether there is anything good and/or lasting from the five year (1553 - 1558) rule of "Bloody Mary." Rightly or wrongly, I fear that Professor Duffy assumed that no non-scholarly expert would look with favor on his generally positive reappraisal of Queen Mary's regime before Duffy had definitively disposed of 400 years of scholarly putting her down. There must exist a thickety scholarly underbrush that Professor Duffy felt he simply had to cut through before an ordinary literate layman could or would read his book with an open mind. Elements of the ancient classic scholarly consensus about Queen Mary include that she was "bloody," which Duffy does not dispute. She led a far from inevitable politico-religious charge that brought nearly 300 male and female dissenting fellow countrymen to death by burning at the stake. Scholars also traditionally insisted that Mary published nothing to justify the burnings. In the process she created so many Protestant martyrs for conscience that she made it easy for her successor Elizabeth to re-Protestantize England. Mary's chief ecclesiastical support was her 16 years older princely Plantagenet (through his mother Margaret, executed by Henry VII), cousin Reginald Pole. Pole had once been a favorite of Henry VIII but had prudently lived outside his home country until Mary became Queen. Pole had meanwhile made a name for himself in Rome, where he was created a Cardinal and convoked the reforming Council of Trent. In one conclave he came within a whisper of being proclaimed Pope himself. The entrenched scholarly view of Pole is that he was too long away from England, no preacher himself and no friend of preaching and did little to help Mary's efforts to bring England back to the Old Faith. Not so, argues Eamon Duffy.
Pole had his weaknesses, of course. He was of princely Plantagenet blood and proud of it. He blamed Henry VIII for having too many non-noble and therefore fawning bishops who owed Henry everything -- as nobles did not. All but one bishop had stood with Henry against the Pope in 1534. By contrast, of the new Catholic bishops appointed under Mary (20 in number), only one bought into Queen Elizabeth's anti-papal declarations. The rest were deposed to go abroad or to prison. Pole and the regime had argued in the 1550s: "Shame on you, England!" Your Christianity is a continuous gift to you by centuries of Bishops of Rome. Your parents were Catholics, your grandparents were Catholics. Were they all deluded sheep? Duffy argues that Pole and Mary made England far more papist than it had ever been before. And that in turn made Catholic underground and above ground resistance to Elizabeth strong enough to last well into her very long reign. Pole, moreover, was himself a gifted preacher in English and he demanded a learned, holy, pro-flock set of University-educated bishops and clergy. Pole created new-style seminaries which became models for the Catholic Counter-Reformation everywhere. Pole also put Church finances on a sound basis -- in the face of the savage despoiling and secularization of Church revenues under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This work of Pole's made it possible for a celibate, Catholic clergy to avoid starvation and minister full-time to their flocks. The sentences above are as close to the non-existent executive summary which FIRES OF FAITH notably lacks. Duffy felt that he had to tackle the moral blot on the Marian years head on: the burnings of heretics. This he does in mind-numbing detail. He also moves across the stage of his narrative dozens of names you are not likely to read about ever again to prove the literary and theological bona fides of Catholic leaders under Queen Mary. Contemporary texts are cited as written, which does nothing to help ease of reading in the 21st Century. For instance: The priest Thomas Tye, once a hot gospeller himself under Edward VI, was now eager to burn heretics. He found a nest of them and wrote to authorities to have them arrested and dealt with: "(for
the loue of God, and for the tender zeale your good Lordshippe beareth
to justice, and common peace and quietnes of the kyng and Queenes
maiesties louing subjects) to award out your warrant for the said
Wylliam Mount his wife, and Rose her daughter, that they beinge
attached and broughte before your good lordship, we trust the rest wyl
feare to offend (theyr ryng leaders of sedition being apprehended)" (Ch.
6, 141f).
This led to the burning of ten men and women. Elsewhere Professor Duffy argues that, horrible or not, the burnings were working. The "ryng leaders of sedition" were either dead, fled to the Continent or keeping a discreet silence. And for every person accused who was punished, dozens were effectively and lovingly counseled to repentance and pardoned. On November 17th, 1558 both Queen Mary Tudor and Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury Reginald Pole died peacefully in their beds. Their brief experiment at re-Catholicizing England was over. Duffy argues that it had worked better than might have been expected. Only their early deaths ended a winning experiment. And their efforts, brief as they were, kept Catholicism alive and the majority, albeit illegal, religion of England for perhaps another 30 years. Difficult as it is, FIRES OF FAITH is a book that I shall keep close to me and re-read. I have already plumbed its bibliography and ordered a recommended biography: Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet by Thomas F. Mayer (Cambridge, 2000). I can only pray that at some point Eamon Duffy judges that he has put his academic foes to flight. And then he should issue an entirely new, more popular, less tortuously argued and more lively fresh look at the tragic years 1553 - 1558. My personal BOTTOM LINE: I rate this book 3.5 stars, rounding up to 4.0. For I regard it as a largely unsuccessful attempt to be both scholarly and popular. -OOO- Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Book_Fires_of_Faith_Catholic_England _Under_Mary_Tudor_Eamon_Duffy/skp_~1/search_string_~eamon %2520duffy%253A%2520fires%2520of%2520faith =-=-=-=-=-=-=- FILE: duffy_marytudor |