The Late Medieval Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome by G. W. Bernard (review)

G. W. Bernard’s account of the late-medieval English Church is a perplexing endeavor. On the one hand he emphasizes his own long-standing dissatisfaction with the “protestant grand narrative” (p. ix) that saw the Reformation as the inevitable outcome of the corruption, decadence, and superstition that were all the late-medieval Church had to offer, and he affirms his broad agreement with the very different view of that Church offered by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992). Yet on the other hand he informs us that it was Duffy’s book itself that provoked his own “rethinking” of the subject, because he found its analysis left it impossible to explain why the Reformation happened at all. Bernard’s alternative interpretation, which he originally set out in a short article about fifteen years ago, offers us “vitality and vulnerability” as a general theory that he hopes will generate vigorous new debate in the field.

What is perplexing is that there is nothing for this new theory to do. The suggestion that Duffy’s analysis of the late-medieval church makes the Reformation seem impossible or inexplicable has often been made, yet it has never been entirely clear what it means. Duffy’s analysis was the culmination of a generation of scholarship that exploded the “protestant grand narrative,” and his explanation of the English Reformation was simple—the late-medieval Church did not totter and fall under its own unstable weight; it was in a stable equilibrium until it was pushed over thanks to a stupendous effort on the part of one of the most powerful kings ever to rule this land—Henry VIII. This is, when one comes down to it, much the same as the explanation Bernard himself offers in The King’s Reformation (New Haven, 2005), however much one might demur at his tendency to reduce an extremely complex set of political maneuvers to a mere act of will on the part of the monarch. “Vitality and vulnerability” are offered as the solution to a supposed problem. But it is not clear what the problem is, nor how the solution works.

Bernard repeatedly affirms the “vitality” of the late-medieval church, but is uncomfortably aware that the focus of his own analysis is “vulnerability.” While anxiously disavowing any intention of reviving the old narrative of corruption and decadence, the theory he advances is that the vulnerabilities explain why the Church did not resist Henry VIII more effectively when the assault of the 1530s was launched. Thus, because pilgrimage could be made to inauthentic relics or to fraudulent images, and could be undertaken for superstitious or self-serving reasons, it was “vulnerable” to the kind of critique that Desiderius Erasmus, Henry VIII’s propagandists, and Protestants leveled against it. But this explains either nothing or too much. Either the late-medieval Church was indeed, as A. G. Dickens maintained, a sort of house of cards, that only needed the lion’s roar to bring it tumbling down; or, as Duffy has persuasively argued, it was not. Of course, the late-medieval Church had its weaknesses. People knew that at the time, and not even Duffy has ever sought to argue otherwise. But either these vulnerabilities are a sufficient cause for the collapse of that Church, or they are not. That is what The Stripping of the Altars was about.

Although, then, this book fails at the theoretical level, it remains both interesting and valuable. The brilliant forensic analysis of the Richard Hunne case with which it opens is the fairest and most thorough ever achieved. Bernard is in his element here, attacking a conceptually straightforward question—was Hunne murdered, or did he hang himself?—through a thicket of contradictory and problematic evidence, to reach a conclusion (suicide) that runs counter to the verdicts or prejudices of the majority of other...