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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 argument acknowledge Duffy's re-creation of the structures of traditional religious life on the eve of the Reformation as a marvel of historical scholarship, one of those books that comes along once in a generation. With the weight of such scholarship behind him, Duffy has more than earned the right to indulge in the occasional partisan polemical assertion.
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, is as narrow a study as The Stripping of the Altars was broad. Duffy calls it "a pendant" to that massive book. It is less a community study than the study of a single text, the parish accounts of Sir Christopher Trychay, Morebath's only priest through the middle decades of the sixteenth century. As a document of social history, these records confirm Duffy's earlier account of the rationalization of Christian belief and practice during the transition from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Perhaps wary of being accused of simply repeating himself, Duffy offers his study as "above all … a convincing portrait of a remarkable man" and a faithful reconstruction "of what the world looked like through his eyes."
That Duffy succeeds as a social historian should come as no surprise to those familiar with his previous work; that he fails as a biographer is less a reflection of his skills than his sources. Still, Duffy bears some responsibility for his choice of "voice" as a framing device for his study. The contrast between his modernist frame and his medieval subject matter points to a serious challenge facing even partisan Christian scholars who continue to work within the established conventions of the historical profession.
Duffy's account of Sir Christopher's Morebath draws on many of the classic tropes of organic wholeness conventionally associated with the sociological concept of Gemeinschaft. This wholeness presents itself immediately in the very documents that are Duffy's main source. No mere financial accounting, the warden's records were a public performance, "the recitation of which served to display the community and its relationships to itself in a particularly concrete way." As seemingly mundane an activity as tracking the movement of church-owned sheep from the care of one parishioner to another "enacted the sharing of communal burden, the bond of neighborhood." And "neighborhood" is the right word, for Duffy explains at the outset that in the sixteeenth century the village consisted of only 33 families. In a world where "no rigid distinction was drawn between the community at prayer, and the community as it went about its business," secular responsibilities needed the sanction of religion and religious responsibilities needed secular reinforcement.
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