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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003) 463-464



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The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. By Eamon Duffy (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) 232 pp. $15.95

This book is a case study of a process that Duffy has studied with greater generality in his magistral Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992), the revolutionary process by which England became Protestant in the sixteenth century. It is made possible by an extraordinary record, a set of unusually detailed parish accounts kept for a small rural parish of only thirty-three families in North Devon by Sir Christopher Trychay, its vicar, from 1520 to 1574. These accounts have not been ignored by previous scholars. In fact, they were edited by J. Erskine Binney, The Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon. 1520-1573 (Exeter, 1904) [End Page 463] but Duffy went back to examine the manuscript originals with greater care than ever before, extracting from them much that is fresh and surprising.

The parishioners of Morebath and their priest were fairly conservative, good Catholics whose religion played a crucial role in ordering their daily life. They nevertheless went along with the changes imposed by succeeding royal governments, nominally becoming Anglo-Catholic under Henry VIII, Protestant under Edward VI, Roman Catholic again under Mary, and finally Anglican under Elizabeth I. They found the Edwardian period particularly difficult. They then had to strip their parish church of many cherished objects, abandon familiar rituals, dissolve institutions created for the support of specific devotions—many dedicated to saints—and respond to continuing demands from the government for more money. Duffy's freshest discovery is that Morebath actually encouraged the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 by providing financial support for five of its young men to join the siege of the city of Exeter, which was quickly crushed with considerable brutality.

Duffy's descriptions of popular religion in sixteenth-century England display the sensitivity to the details of religious observance that scholars have come to expect of him. He possesses an anthropologist's eye for telling details in human behavior, as in his close descriptions of Trychay's attempts to introduce a new cult of a Devonshire Saint Sidwell, or his campaign to obtain a set of black vestments for funeral Masses. But Duffy's descriptions are also meticulously controlled by his sources, occasionally supplemented by analogous sources from similar parishes. He carefully avoids unwarranted speculation. He reveals once more the vitality of popular Catholicism in many parts of pre-Reformation England and the real distress created by the imposition of religious change upon ordinary people.

Duffy concedes that villages in other parts of England welcomed the Reformation and even saw it as enormously liberating. But that point is not the focus of his interest. Study of the religious experiences of committed Protestants he leaves to other scholars. They will face a considerable challenge in matching Duffy's remarkable empathy and impressive technical research skills.

 



Robert M. Kingdon
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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