Eamon Duffy's celebrated The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (1992), which opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism, was a book born when its author learned to drive. The motor car diverted him from other historical pursuits and took him to those East Anglian churches which, after a century of drastic iconoclasm, and a later century of Victorian 'restoration', still conserve so many precious vestiges of that old religion. If Duffy had been employed in, say, Keele, or Leeds, this might never have happened. So there is something to be said after all for the location of the University of Cambridge, which, as its denizens tend to complain, is a dank sort of fenny place with nothing to protect it from the chill winds of Siberia but the low hills of the Urals. Some thought that Duffy's great book might have been called Christianity in the East - with reference to John Bossy's brilliant and more wide-ranging anatomy of late medieval religion, Christianity in the West (1985).

LRB 25 April 2002 | PDF Download