Published to mark the 500th anniversary of the events of 1517, Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the cataclysmic transformations of European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The religious revolution initiated by Martin Luther is usually referred to as 'The Reformation', a tendentious description implying that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations of Europe was a single process, in which a defective ...

Bloomsbury presents Reformation Divided written and read by Eamon Duffy.Published to mark the 500th anniversary of the events of 1517, Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the cataclysmic transformations of European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The religious revolution initiated by Martin Luther is usually referred to as ‘The Reformation’, a tendentious description implying that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations...

As an authority on the religion of medieval and early modern England, Professor Eamon Duffy is preeminent.In his revisionist masterpiece The Stripping of the Altars, Duffy opened up new areas of research and entirely fresh perspectives on the origin and progress of the English Reformation. Duffy's focus has always been on the practices and institutions through which ordinary people lived and experienced their religion, but which the Protestant reformers ab...

In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about. Tracing the fraught history of religious change in Tudor England, and the retellings of that history to shape a protestant national identity, once again he emphasizes the importance of the study of late medieval religion and material culture for our understanding of this most formative and fascinating of eras.Getting to ...

Christianity is a hugely diverse and quarrelsome family of faiths, but most Christians have nevertheless set great store by orthodoxy - literally, 'right opinion' - even if they cannot agree what that orthodoxy should be. The notion that there is a 'catholic', or universal, Christian faith - that which, according to the famous fifth-century formula, has been believed everywhere, at all times and by all people - is itself an act of faith: to reconcile it with the historical fact of persiste...

In these vivid and approachable essays Eamon Duffy engages with some of the central aspects of Western religion in the thousand years between the decline of pagan Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation.In the process he opens windows on the vibrant and multifaceted beliefs and practices by which medieval people made sense of their world: the fear of death and the impact of devastating pandemic, holy war against Islam and the invention of the blood libel ag...

Bloomsbury presents Royal Books and Holy Bones written and read by Eamon Duffy.In these vivid and approachable essays Eamon Duffy engages with some of the central aspects of Western religion in the thousand years between the decline of pagan Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation.In the process he opens windows on the vibrant and multifaceted beliefs and practices by which medieval people made sense of their world: the fear of death and the impact of devastating pa...

The King James Bible was a landmark in the history of the English language, and an inspiration to poets, dramatists, artists and politicians. Without the King James Bible there would have been no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim's Progress, no Handel's Messiah. Yet more than a literary, even more than a religious influence, it was seen as a social, economic and political text. Those seeking to overthrow the English monarchy and those wanting to retain it, both sought support from the same Bible.

The great echoing phrases of the King James Bible that have boomed through the English-speaking mind for 400 years - an eye for an eye . . . eat, drink and be merry . . . . death, where is thy sting? . . . man shall not live by bread alone - are largely the work of a man whose genius for words matches Shakespeare. But William Tyndale, the young Gloucestershire tutor who wrote them, paid for them with his life. He was persecuted, exiled and eventually burned at the stake.Book of Fir...

This book seeks to explain the ways in which Anglicans have sought to practise theology in their various contexts. It is a clear, insightful, and reliable guide which avoids technical jargon and roots its discussions in concrete examples. The book is primarily a work of historical theology, which engages deeply with key texts and writers from across the tradition (e.g. Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Taylor, Butler, Simeon, Pusey, Huntington, Temple, Ramsey, and many others). As well as being suit...

While many of us are familiar with such famous words as, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here. . ." or "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," we may not know that they originated with The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters. Here Alan Jacobs tells its story. Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer--from its beginnings as...

The changes brought about during the English Reformation clearly reflected the desire of the Crown, government and landed classes to reduce the political power and landed wealth of the late medieval Church. This book covers the background to the Reformation, the processes which brought about these major changes and the impact on the clergy and the general population.