Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy is professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge.

Letter

Hissing

8 March 2018

If St Jerome were to be indicted for misogyny, he would undoubtedly have to plead guilty. But Anne Enright’s specific charges against him in her exposition of the Genesis story of the Fall aren’t quite in focus. Jerome does indeed translate the claim in the first letter to Timothy that Eve was deceived with the word seductus (the Greek is exapatetheisa). But seductus in fourth-century Latin did...
Letter

Such Consolation!

7 February 2008

Eamon Duffy writes: Edward Pearce thinks that Mary Tudor’s burning of almost three hundred Protestants was loathsome beyond words, while Elizabeth’s strangling, castration and slow disembowelling of roughly the same number of Catholics was justifiable, because Catholics are bloodthirsty and cruel. I think both sets of executions were appalling, but asked the different question, was Mary’s regime...

The Crowe is White: Bloody Mary

Hilary Mantel, 24 September 2009

Mary’s bishops wanted recantations more than they wanted executions. There was always the possibility of a last-minute change of heart; this would not free the condemned person from the stake, but it...

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Eamon Duffy’s celebrated The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (1992), which opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism, was a...

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Homage to the Old Religion

Susan Brigden, 27 May 1993

At the Reformation a world was lost that could never be recovered. The images and altars, the dooms and roods of the parish churches, the towers and cloisters of the religions houses were...

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Protestant Country

George Bernard, 14 June 1990

Henry VIII’s jurisidictional quarrel with the Papacy was not resolved, and its consequences are with us still. In Henry’s eyes the dispute was one of authority, not doctrine, but...

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