Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid MacCulloch is an emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford and a fellow of St Cross College. His books include A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Silence: A Christian History and a Life of Thomas Cromwell.

Letter

No Marriage

9 June 2022

Lawrence Duggan misses the point in his critique of my remarks on clerical celibacy in the medieval Western Church (Letters, 21 July). He objects to the phrase ‘the 450-year-old prohibition on clergy getting married, unique to the Western Latin Church’. I now see that this particular wording is an editorial intervention that I overlooked: I had written more precisely about ‘the 450-year-old prohibition...
Letter

Pain and Peril

24 May 2012

A.E.J. Fitchett refers to my comments on the service of ‘churching’ in the Book of Common Prayer and suggests that I am thinking of its 1549 predecessor in referring to ‘overtones of purification from ritual uncleanness’, rather than the version re-edited in 1662, with its greater emphasis on thanksgiving (Letters, 30 August). Formally he might be right; but his insight escaped three centuries...

In​ 1517 a fierce commercial struggle broke out in England between two enterprising competitors in the busy trade of saving souls. The English Province of Austin Friars and Our Lady’s...

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Wrong Kind of Noise: Silence is Best

Marina Warner, 19 December 2013

By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t...

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Our Supersubstantial Bread: God’s Plot

Frank Kermode, 25 March 2010

Eamon Duffy, whose opinion of this book will not be lightly disputed, remarks on its jacket that ‘everyone who reads it will learn things they didn’t know.’ Most lay reviewers...

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What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps....

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Close Shaves

Gerald Hammond, 31 October 1996

The last few years have seen a remarkable surge in studies of the Reformation period and this book by Diarmaid MacCulloch is the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the...

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