103 of 110 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Restoring the Church; Inventing the Counter-Reformation, August 9, 2009
This review is from: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Hardcover)
The brief reign of Mary I has hitherto been regarded as an anomaly in the steady progress of England in the Whig mythology of British history. It's considered a throwback to the Middle Ages, a dark time of superstition and tyranny, illuminated only by the fires of Smithfield and Oxford. Eamon Duffy sets out to revise this view, dealing with at least five major misconceptions about Catholic England under Mary I:
1). Papal Legate and Archbishop of Canterbury Reginald Pole was not that involved with the restoration of Catholicism, he did not agree with the policy of burnings, and did not encourage preaching enough.
Often this is held because Pole refused the assistance of the Jesuits in England. As Duffy notes, Pole had a different program of renewal planned from the Jesuit program. John Foxe actually minimized Pole's culpability in the heresy trials, but Pole was ultimately in charge of them. As Legate and Archbishop, Duffy demonstrates, Pole certainly encouraged preaching, preaching himself or preparing sermons for publication.
2). Pole and Mary ignored opportunities for propaganda against protestants, especially missing out on preaching or controlling the situation at the burning of heretics.
Duffy answers this charge by emphasizing how the new regime took advantage of Northumberland's speech on the scaffold before his execution. The leader of the plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne admitted his errors in continuing the protestant reformation under Edward VI and repented, having reverted to Catholicism. Duffy also notes that Pole was very much concerned with guiding popular opinion at the burnings, with preachers there to admonish both the heretics and any in the crowd who might share their errors.
3). The campaign of burnings did not work; the crowds shared the protestant cause of the victims in part because of their revulsion against the cruelty of the judges and the executions.
The judges did all they could to avoid condemning most laymen and women to the stake. The regime had to deal with the leaders of protestantism directly, although Duffy absolutely regrets the execution of Cranmer, surely an act of revenge by Mary for the sufferings he caused her and her mother. John Foxe's Book of Martyrs is the culprit here; a biased and untrustworthy volume, it is usually accepted on face value. For instance, Duffy notes that Latimer never told Ridley to "play the man"--Foxe is paraphrasing Polycarp, martyr of the early Church.
Duffy contends that the campaign to extirpate the protestant heresy from England was working. It only ended because Mary and Pole died. Our 21st century moral standards aside (based on a marvelous record of genocide, world wars, communist and totalitarian tyranny, abortion, etc), Duffy reminds us that the purpose of history is to understand that other country, the past, not to impose our standards upon it. If the purpose of history is the latter, Elizabeth I should be called "Bloody Bess" because torture, hanging, drawing and quartering are not humane ways of dealing with recusancy and dissent either.
4). All the regime had was this negative campaign to impose Catholicism on the people.
Duffy here answers with a culmination of facts: the regime did mount a preaching campaign, a catechetical campaign, a publishing program, and a reforming plan. This judgment is usually based on the hindsight that the reign lasted only five years. But Duffy reminds us that Mary and Pole did not know that they only had five years! They lived life as we do, in the present, ignorant of the future. They had a plan; death and Elizabeth cut its accomplishment short.
5). The restoration of Catholicism under Mary I was out-of-date, ignoring Counter-Reformation guidance of the Council of Trent.
This is backwards, contends Duffy: The restoration of Catholicism in England under Mary I set Counter-Reformation standards of the Council of Trent. Pole's efforts were models for Charles Borromeo, the great reforming Cardinal Archbishop of Milan. Marian England set the standards of seminary training, bishops in residence, the catechism of the Council of Trent, the use of tabernacles in churches, etc.
Pole turned around the failure of the bishops under Henry VIII to uphold the unity of the Church and the primacy of the pope. Remember that only bishop, John Fisher, stood up against Henry's power grab. When Mary and Pole died and Elizabeth I succeeded, only one bishop submitted to her religious settlement. The rest declared their belief in transubstantiation, the Sacrifice of the Mass, the primacy of the pope and the unity of the Church--therefore they were removed from office and either went into exile or died in prison.
In summary: Mary and Reginald Pole left a legacy of brave men and women who remained true to their faith, setting up seminaries abroad and returning missionary priests to serve the recusant laity. The campaign against heresy was working in Marian England; the reform efforts of Pole and his bishops were following his plan of renewal. Duffy marshals documentary evidence and clear reasoning to establish their success and true legacy, contra the received opinion of Whiggish historians.
Duffy does not treat all aspects of Marian Catholicism, however. He does not address the material refurnishing of churches, the limited refoundation of monastic orders, or other administration type details. Well illustrated with excellent notes and bibliography: Highly recommended.
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30 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Queen of England "Bloody Mary" was better than her enemies made her out to be, December 21, 2009
This review is from: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Hardcover)
I am 74 years old and a cradle Roman Catholic. Growing up in passionately Protestant Shreveport, I wept when I read in high school my first book about Queen Mary Tudor, her husband King Philip II of Spain and their effort to win England, Ireland and Wales back to fealty to the Pope. I thought that they should have won for the Greater Glory of God. I am not a professional historian (my working career was in American diplomacy). But I think I am part of precisely the non-professional part of Eamon Duffy's readership he meant to pitch his book toward.
As the decades have rolled along I have read much in the religious history of England, Ireland and Scotland but did not return to Queen Mary's reign (1553 - 1558) until I read a review of Eamon Duffy's FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. I then bought the book, learned a few new facts, vastly enjoyed the book's 30 plates and six maps. At first glance, it seemed to have all the trappings of a good, solid, readable, reasonably popular history book useful to educated publics who are not specialized in Tudor times or the English Reformation. It had a "Select" Bibliography -- often a sign that the author is writing for non-specialists. The notes were ample but not overwhelming.
So I settled back for a good read. By book's end, however, I was greatly disappointed in FIRES OF FAITH: CATHOLIC ENGLAND UNDER MARY TUDOR. It was nothing like as readable as Duffy's earlier THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS (under Mary's father King Henry VIII). It was largely a polemic against other historians specialized in the history of the Reformation in England. To his credit, Cambridge University Professor Eamon Duffy was frank about his limited objectives.
-- (1) He was trying to dig beneath a huge mound solid as concrete: 400 and more years of historical misinterpretation and supercilious bad-mouthing of Queen Mary (1516 - 1558) and her right hand clergyman and Royal Plantagenet cousin Cardinal Archbishop Reginald Pole (1500 - 1558). He had to dispose of the classical, widely accepted misrepresentations before he could reassess the Marian lustrum in its own lights.
-- (2) That project, it seemed to me, meant that FIRES OF FAITH are a work distinctly preliminary to something yet to come and notably more readable. Duffy says as much: he is not writing a biography of Queen Mary or of Cardinal Pole. There are many aspects of Mary's reign he will not touch in any depth: restoration of the monasteries and such like. The book is focused. Its theme is an aspect or two of the re-Catholicization of England, how well it was planned and executed and how it might have succeeded but for the Queen's dying at a relatively young age.
Within those limitations Duffy might have written a more readable book except for one unavoidable hurdle: the execution by burning of more than 280 Englishmen and Englishwomen whose consciences did not allow them to profess Mary's and Pole's Roman Catholicism. Modern readers are not likely to see much good in Mary's reign were an author to sweep those executions under a rug. And Duffy does not. Page after page he recounts the hunts for heretics, the trials, the efforts to persuade dissidents to come back to Roman and Royal obedience and the final moments of the Protestant martyrs. A dozen of those anti-Protestant processes and executions are shown in color.
Duffy can never get away from those burnings. Their honest narrative takes up a sizeable portion of his text. He tries to show religious persecutions and executions for heresy as not uncommon in other countries at the same time -- though the methods of killing varied. Duffy also argues that the Marian regime and Cardinal Pole were sensitive to the need to justify the persecutions for conscience both to the English people at large and to fellow Europeans. The executions were drawn heavily from the Protestant south and midlands and did not touch large, more religiously conservative parts of England.
During executions the appointed preachers made a point of stressing the anarchical character of the faith professions of those to be executed. If a dozen were about to die, there might be ten contradictory interpretations of sacraments or rites among them. Your Protestant, logically, was each man a church or a religion unto himself, the preachers argued.
The official apologetics of the Marian years also stressed that Catholic England had been created and sustained by Bishops of Rome dead and gone for many centuries. To cast off the Pope was, therefore, to tear out England's heart and to disrespect one's Catholic parents, grandparents and forebears. Much of that argument stuck. Where only one bishop, Saint John Fisher, had remained papist when Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, by striking contrast, only one bishop, Anthony Kitchin of Llandaff, did NOT stay papist when Mary's successor, her half sister Elizabeth Tudor, peacefully ascended the throne in November 1558. In a rare outburst of color, author Duffy described Bishop Kitchin as "one classic timeserver who would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, provided he was allowed to hold on to the See of Llandaff" (Ch.1, p. 23).
Duffy argues that the way Mary and Pole returned, if only briefly, England, Ireland and Wales to official unity with Papal Rome was much studied, admired and copied on the European continent. This is especially true of Pole's insistence on a well educated, pastorally inclined clergy, formally educated in seminaries and universities.
This book, as written, cries out for an executive summary. It is not likely to be widely read outside narrow scholarly circles. And even there it may be wrongly discounted because historians simply despise "Bloody Mary" Tudor as a Hitler before Hitler. Duffy's book is not a failure, but it might have been better edited. I rate it 3.5 stars, rounding upward to four * * * *. -OOO-
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