Royal Books and Holy Bones by Eamon Duffy

From The Church Times:

This tremendous read is a collection of essays published (and lectures given) in the past two decades, some revised for inclusion here. The book is given unity by grouping them under thematic headings, but the profounder unity of these studies lies in Duffy’s remark that “Christianity is a material religion.”

A great strength of the author’s work has always lain in his ability to put theology in its place in the practical realities of Christian living, especially during the Middle Ages and the Reformation.

This is a book for the general reader, spiced throughout with Duffy’s profound scholarly understanding of the giant subjects with which each essay grapples. There are robust challenges to the conclusions of some other modern scholars.

The book is not cluttered with footnotes; it is selectively referenced chapter by chapter at the end. The excellent illustrations are in colour.

A century of holy heroes

Peter Standord reviews Eamon Duffy's "Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants & the Conversion of England" for the Spectator:

The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther producing his 95 Theses, to break it up into bite-size pieces in order to sample its distinctive local flavours. Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of Christian history at Cambridge, takes England as his territory, and quickly deprecates the very word Reformation as an ‘unsatisfactory designation concealing a battery of value judgments’. Instead, he sets out to investigate what he characterises as largely a series of homegrown reformations and counter-reformations.

So far, so sensible, but the process of reduction is then taken a step further. Duffy’s ability to shape his scholarship to a wide audience is well known, shown to dazzling effect in The Stripping of the Altars, his groundbreaking 1992 account of the rude good health of late medieval English Catholicism before Henry VIII’s version of the Reformation. Here, however, he offers not a single narrative, but rather a series of 14 essays that range, apparently randomly, from Thomas More’s publication of Utopia in 1516 to George Fox’s founding of the Quakers in the late 1640s.

read more here @ the Spectator, @ the Guardian, and @ the Telegraph