Volume 49, Number 17 · November 7, 2002
A Vanished World
By Keith Thomas
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
by Eamon Duffy
Yale University Press, 232 pp., $22.50
As one of the great determining events of English history, the Protestant Reformation has never ceased to be the subject of passionate controversy. In his Acts and Monuments (better known as the Book of Martyrs), the sixteenth-century Protestant John Foxe portrayed the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries, and the dismantling of Catholic worship as the triumph of godliness over anti-Christian corruption; it was a return to the simplicities of the early Church, whose traditions had been revived in the later Middle Ages by John Wycliffe and other proto-Protestants; persecuted as heretics by the Catholic Church, they triumphed, when godly monarchs rallied to their cause.
Review, 3958 words
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