Eamon Duffy | The New York Review of Books

Why Was There a Reformation?

Though Steven Ozment’s The Age of Reform appeared amid a wave of critical thought about the Reformation, it rejected the new histories in favor of polemic.

The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe

by Steven Ozment, with forewords by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers

February 25, 2021 issue

It Was Mary and Paul

December 19, 2019 issue

A portrait of Saint Luke from the Augustine Gospel book, late 500s

Sacred Glamour

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World

by Christopher de Hamel

The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript from Genocide to Justice

by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World Through Illuminated Manuscripts

edited by Bryan C. Keene

December 5, 2019 issue

Letter

Eamon Duffy

It Was Mary and Paul

December 19, 2019 issue

Feasting on Erasmus

May 9, 2019 issue

Hans Holbein the Younger: Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam, circa 1523

The World Split in Two

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

by Michael Massing

April 18, 2019 issue

Letter

Michael Massing

Feasting on Erasmus

May 9, 2019 issue

Far from the Tree

Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton

by Rob Iliffe

March 8, 2018 issue

Secret Knowledge—or a Hoax?

Four centuries of attempts to decode, decipher, or translate the Voynich manuscript have all ended in bafflement.

The Voynich Manuscript

edited by Raymond Clemens, with an introduction by Deborah Harkness

April 20, 2017 issue

A postcard in Yiddish commemorating the verdict in the 1913 trial of Mendel Beilis, a Jew charged with the ritual religious killing of a Christian child in Kiev. The jury acquitted Beilis but judged that the crime had occurred. Tsar Nicholas II (center) is bidding Beilis to go free—‘but I won’t waste any time in getting even for your acquittal with your Russian brothers you’ve left behind.’ The seated old man depicts the ‘Jewish people’; the ball and chain is labeled ‘blood libel.’ A conference on the blood libel will be presented by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Center for Jewish History in New York on October 9.

The First Blood Libel Against the Jews

The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe

by E.M. Rose

October 27, 2016 issue

The Wonder of Paris

September 29, 2016 issue

A page from La Vie de Saint Denys, an illuminated manuscript presented by Gilles de Pontoise, abbot of Saint-Denis, to King Philippe V in 1317. ‘Below large-scale representations of the saint’s preaching, trials, tortures, and death,’ Eamon Duffy writes, are ‘vivid vignettes of life along the Seine’: ‘diminutive townspeople shop or borrow from moneylenders, physicians inspect flasks of their patients’ urine, animals are driven to slaughter, millers stagger under sacks of corn, workmen trundle wheelbarrows, and boatmen row goods and passengers up and down the river.’

A Great, Ignored Transformation?

A History of Balance, 1250–1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought

by Joel Kaye

May 26, 2016 issue

Letter

Joel Kaye

The Wonder of Paris

September 29, 2016 issue

Who Is the Pope?

The differences between Francis and his predecessors are wide, deep, and momentous for the church

The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope

by Austen Ivereigh

A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis

by Antonio Spadaro, SJ

Pope Francis: Untying the Knots

by Paul Vallely

February 19, 2015 issue

Letter

Kevin Di Camillo

A Door For Catholic Women

May 7, 2015 issue

Saint Michael weighing souls in Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment, circa 1445–1450

The Intense Afterlife of the Saints

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation

by Robert Bartlett

In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and the Golden Legend

by Jacques Le Goff, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane

June 19, 2014 issue

Sebastiano Ricci: Pope Paul III Preparing the Council of Trent, 1687–1688

The Staying Power of Christianity

The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

by Robert Louis Wilken

Trent: What Happened at the Council

by John W. O’Malley

June 20, 2013 issue

An angel appearing to the Magi, from The Queen Mary Psalter, circa 1310–1320

Books Held by Kings

‘Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination’ at the British Library

Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination

an exhibition at the British Library, London, November 11, 2011–March 13, 2012

June 7, 2012 issue

A deacon preparing to sing the Exultet, or Easter Proclamation, while grasping the Paschal candle that the bishop is lighting; illustration in an Exultet roll, a long strip of parchment containing the text and music of the hymn, late tenth century

The Rise of Sacred Song

The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years

by Christopher Page

January 12, 2012 issue

The Roman Catholic monstrance known as the ‘Prague Sun,’ made in Vienna and studded with more than six thousand diamonds, 1699. It is in the treasury of the Loreto Sanctuary in Prague.

Sacred Bones & Blood

Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe

by Caroline Walker Bynum

August 18, 2011 issue

The Victorian theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman, who was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010

A Hero of the Church

Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint

by John Cornwell

December 23, 2010 issue

King Louis IX; polychrome wooden statue, fourteenth century

The Greatest of the Saint-Kings?

Saint Louis

by Jacques Le Goff, translated from the French by Gareth Evan Gollrad

April 8, 2010 issue

‘The First Great Pandemic in History’

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750

edited by Lester K. Little

May 29, 2008 issue

Letter

Bruce Fetter

It’s Not Just Fleas

September 25, 2008 issue

Early Christian Impresarios

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea

by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams

The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship

by Megan Hale Williams

March 29, 2007 issue