Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition

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.

This book is a collection of essays on various aspects of early modern English religion which Duffy has written over the past fifteen years, complemented by a few previously unpublished pieces. Collections like that can be annoyingly miscellaneous, but here the stronger impression is of the unity of his body of work. A series of strong, consistent ideas emerges. Nobody who knows Duffy’s robust approach to the Reformation will be surprised by anything that is here, but they will still find it worth reading.

• List of Plates and FiguresPart I: Reformation UnravelledIntroduction1. Reformation, Counter-reformation and the English nation2. Reformation Unravelled: Facts and FictionsPart II: The Material Culture of Early Tudor Catholicism3. The Parish, Piety and Patronage: the Evidence of Roodscreens4. Salle Church and the Reformation 5. The End of It All: Medieval Church Goods and the 1552 ConfiscationsPart III: Two Cardinals6. John Fisher and the Spirit of his Age7. The Religion of John Fisher8. Rome and Catholicity in mid-Tudor England9. Cardinal Pole and Archbishop CranmerPart IV: Catholic Voices10. The Conservative Voice in the English Reformation11. Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's EnglandNotesAcknowledgementsIndex