May/June 2002 History Features

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Several years ago I attended a lecture by Eamon Duffy sponsored by the history department of a major Midwestern faith-based university. The exact title escapes me, but I distinctly remember the word "disenchantment" appearing on the posters advertising the talk—as in, "The Disenchantment of the World in a Sixteenth-Century English Town." I was surprised that a leading historian would use such an old-fashioned, Weberian concept to analyze a process of historical change whose complexity his professional peers relentlessly insist eludes all such simplistic sociological modeling. I was even more surprised when his talk, primarily an account of the architectural changes Protestant Reformers inflicted on the church at Morebath, "a tiny Devonshire sheep-farming village," proved true to its title. Duffy's account of the dismantling of the rich symbolic universe of medieval Catholicism would have fit nicely into any of Weber's essays on the sociology of religion, except for its bald concluding assertion that this disenchantment was a bad thing. Behind the closed doors of a department meeting, several of the hosting historians denounced Duffy as an ideologue.

Partisan, yes. Ideologue, no. Some ten years ago Duffy caused a stir among historians of early modern Europe with the publication of his magisterial The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. In that book, whose influence quickly spread beyond narrow disciplinary borders, Duffy advanced what for some was (and still is) the outrageous thesis that the Reformation was forced on an English populace largely content with a vital lay piety that was the legacy of Catholic reforms initiated in the late medieval period. Even those unconvinced by his overall ...