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Reviews 193 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Duffy, Eamon, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001; hardback; pp. xiii, 208; 26 b/w and colour illustrations; RRP US$22.50; ISBN 0300091850. The rise of social and cultural history, and the sub-genres rural and urban history, have all proved most useful in enabling historians to discuss the political and ecclesiastical change and continuity in everyday life in England across the pre and post-Reformation period. The origin of the English Reformation provides one of the best examples of this call to villagers’experiences to explain the outcomes, complexity and consequences of national events. Questions surrounding ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘when’ the English Reformation actually occurred underpin the continually growing body of literature in Reformation Studies. Professor Eamon Duffy is best known for his ground breaking work on the English Reformation, most notably The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (1992), and in a broader religious history context more recently with Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997). Duffy observes that he ‘wanted to write Morebath’s story since’ he ‘encountered its priest and his remarkable accounts while working on … The Stripping of the Altars ’. We can only be immensely grateful that he has written this book! There are twelve colour plates at the beginning of the book that introduce us to this rural landscape, allowing us to step nimbly from Christopher Tricky’s pages into the world of Reformation Morebath. The management and revenue from the church sheep, beehives, ales, and the collective endeavours of the women and men of the parish in support of the various parish saints, as well as their accounts as churchwardens, all provide a vivid description of the centrality of religion to everyday life. Furthermore the mechanics of the religious economy of this prereformation community is spelt out for us in detail. Tricky’s church book provides a startlingly and strikingly rich account not only of his ‘voice’, but also the voices of his parishioners, as this community struggled with issues of religious conscience and practice between 1520 and 1574. Tricky depicts a politically aware, astute, and active parish. His accounts in his book were audited – that is read out and heard – by his parishioners gathered in Morebath parish church. Tricky’s church book is a rare example of the praxis of oral, visual, and literate culture in pre-Reformation piety. Morebath demonstrates how one very small rural parish navigated and negotiated its religious transformation during what Duffy describes as England’s move ‘from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed 194 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) churches and anti-papal preaching’. Duffy engagingly and compellingly weaves the voices of Morebath into his own narrative of their particular experiences of change and transformation, continuity and compliance, and religious conscience, conflict, and compromise. Duffy’s revisiting of Tricky’s account book in 1995 produced a startling revelation hinging on a single transcription error. The correction of this error resulted in a revision of Morebath’s place in Reformation historiography, dispelling W. G. Hoskins’ description of Morebath as ‘the archetypical conformist Devon parish’(p.136). Instead, Tricky’s accounts record how the parishioners of Morebath paid for four young men to join the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion marching to ‘davys down’ camp. Therefore the confiscation of the clappers from their parish bells was a direct punishment for their involvement in the Rebellion, rather than just as a consequence of their geographical proximity within the rebellious county’s boundary. This highlights the parishioners’ dilemma regarding religious change, and more broadly hints at the range of possible crises that were experienced by other individual parishes across the nation. How might a parish respond to what they saw as radical and unacceptable religious change? The voices of Morebath poignantly express their religious anguish, rebellion, and eventual expediency at the series of radical religious upheavals and reversals in State sanctioned religious practice between 1530 and 1580. These villagers’ experience of and responses to national change in religious policy were deeply personal as...

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