J.L. Nelson

The notion that the Reformation made art ‘no longer sacred’ keeps company in Joseph Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image with a view of medieval religion as a magical business in which a passive laity was only marginally involved. Eamon Duffy does well to end his review of Koerner by discussing two images of the ‘devout inwardness’ of late medieval Catholic devotion (LRB, 19 August). Neither...

W.S. Milne (Letters, 16 November) quite rightly points out that Charles Péguy’s writings about Joan of Arc had ‘effects’ in the years around 1900. I hadn’t meant to ignore those, but in suggesting that Joan was ‘little known in France until the First World War’, I was reflecting on early 20th-century survey evidence noted by Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen (1977), which showed that...