HIS 218 & REL 218 Church History II: Reformation to the Present

Henry VIII's reformation remains among the most crucial yet misunderstood events in English history. Bernard presents the king not as a pawn in the hands of manipulative factions, but as the determining mover of religious policy throughout this momentous period. In his campaign to secure a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which led him to break with Rome, his strategy, as Bernard shows, was more consistent and more radical than historians have allowed. Henry refused to introduce Lutheranism, but rather harnessed the rhetoric of the continental reformation in support of his royal supremacy.

This history tells the story of how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes forced upon them by the Reformation and, in doing so, radically reconstructed their culture.

Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the 'The Reformation.' This book challenges the common thought that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations of Europe was a single process, in which a defective form of Christianity was replaced by 'the midwife of the modern world'. The book challenges these assumptions by tracing the ways in which the project of reforming Christendom from within broke apart into conflicting and often murderous energies and ideologies, dividing not only Catholic from Protestant, but creating deep internal rifts within all the churches which emerged from Europe's religious conflicts.

Once again he emphasises the importance of a study of Late Medieval religion and society for an understanding of the Reformation, he rescues Mary Tudor and Cardinal Pole from their detractors but shows once again his brilliance at understanding the effect of the Reformation on the population at large and the common man. Duffy writes at all times with grace, elegance and wit as he sees through the prejudices and myths of other Reformation scholars and demonstrates that the truth is never pure nor simple. This is revisionist history at its very best.

This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system.

The English Bible---the mot familiar book in our language---is the product of a man who was exiled, vilified, betrayed, then strangled, then burnt. William Tyndale left England in 1524 to translate the word of God into English. This was heresy, punishable by death. Sir Thomas More, hailed as a saint and a man for all seasons, considered it his divine duty to pursue Tyndale. He did so with an obsessive ferocity that, in all probability, led to Tyndale's capture and death.