Disenchanting Voices

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.

Duffy diverges from these standard tropes by rendering Morebath a particularly democratic version of the premodern community. The constant revenue-generating concerns of the church provided the laity with numerous opportunities through leadership of the various “stores” or devotional funds raised by parish organizations responsible for general maintenance and special church projects. The diversity of these stores (very roughly analogous to the deacons’ fund, the trustees’ fund, and so on in modern churches), reflected the diverse social groups that made up the parish. Women were in charge of their own stores, and could even hold positions of power over men in mixed-sex stores.

A large part of the fundraising was directed toward Masses for the dead and upkeep of the statues and altars of various saints, a practice that symbolically extended the community of Morebath back through time and beyond this world into the next. Still, avoiding nostalgia, Duffy gives ample evidence of tension and conflict. Dabbling in the language of cultural anthropology, Duffy writes of the Tudor parish as “a forum in which the sometimes troublesome obligations of neighborhood were prescribed and enacted.” His concern is less with showing how well people got along than with evoking the richly communal social forms through which they adjudicated conflict.

It was these forms, rather than conflict as such, that came to an end with the religious reforms imposed from Henry through Elizabeth. The symbolic reduction—and financial consolidation—of these reforms is perhaps best captured by the changes in the management of the parish’s sheep: “Our Lady’s sheep, St. Sidwell’s sheep, and all the sheep of the other stores are from henceforth ‘the church sheep.’ ” Duffy argues convincingly for Morebath’s general resistance to these reforms, culminating in the participation of several parishioners in the bloodiest popular resistance to the Reformation, the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549. Edward VI’s violent crackdown on Catholic resistance caused Sir Christopher to mute his Catholic sympathies, a strategy of prudence he continued until his death in 1574.

Sir Christopher’s ultimately religious loyalty lay with place rather than doctrine. Morebath, not Protestantism, triumphed over Catholicism. Accommodation, not zeal, secured the ultimate victory of the Reformation in England. Generally sympathetic to Sir Christopher, Duffy nonetheless sees a general decline in the “warmth and humanity” in his writing over the course of his settling into the new order. In the dismantling of the stores Duffy sees a “process of cooling and disenchantment”; in the general decline of traditional Catholicism he sees “a coarsening of social fibre.” Despite such loaded judgments, he insists that he does not intend his study of Morebath as proof of any thesis.

The only aspect of the book less convincing than this disclaimer is Duffy’s effort to extend his argument for the vitality of popular resistance to the Reformation from the objective level of external events to the subjective level of internal beliefs. Duffy is too good a historian not to leave evidence of wrong turns taken on his journey to the “hidden places” of popular piety. He opens his chapter on “The Piety of Morebath” by conceding: “We are forever shut out from all but the surface of Morebath’s religion.” Basing most of his account of Morebath on Sir Christopher’s records, he acknowledges that “neither the solemnities of the liturgy nor the secrets of the heart leave much trace in churchwardens’ accounts.” Duffy further points to a fundamental paradox in the study of popular religion, or popular culture in general: “Routine … leaves few records, even though most of what is fundamental to ordinary existence is a matter of routine.”

Such tough-minded realism as to the limitations of sources might reasonably lead Duffy on to subjects where existing evidence promises more fruitful inquiry. As is so often the case with such studies, however, a kind of academic populism leads Duffy to boldly go where paradox has had the good sense not to go. Attacking a strawman of academic Élitism, he defends the integrity of the “undocumented, invisible” world of routine that has been “far too easily discounted by the historian seeking to touch the texture of the life of the past.”

Some of the invisibility of Morebath’s popular piety is the work of history: most of the records of the parish were lost when a Luftwaffe bomb destroyed the Exeter Probate Office in 1942. For this lost evidence, Duffy draws on surviving records from neighboring parishes to make his responsibly guarded inferences as to popular practice in Morebath. Some of this invisibility is, however, the work of culture: that is, a late medieval culture that did not feel the need to document the practices of everyday life, much less the personal feelings and perceptions with which people regarded those practices. For this lost evidence, Duffy attempts unsuccessfully to translate the popular piety of late medieval England into the contemporary category of “voice,” a concept that as used in current academic writing suggests a deep interiority nowhere evident in Duffy’s account of Morebath.

Indeed, much in Duffy’s book works against such a simplistic translation. To his credit, he does not attempt to render the “textures” of life through the conventions of the social and psychological realism bequeathed to the historical profession when novelists decided to move on to more interesting problems—but to his shame, and to this reader’s frustration, he often writes as if he has done just this. Duffy introduces his account as the rendering of “a chorus of forgotten but fascinating voices,” but by the end of the second chapter concedes that “All the voices of Morebath are one voice,” that of Sir Christopher. This voice is on the one hand representative, expressing the shared values of the community, yet on the other hand highly distinctive, even idiosyncratic. When it comes to what Sir Christopher actually thought about the outlawing of the cult of the saints, for instance, Duffy concedes “we can only guess.” The book is full of such qualifications and speculations regarding motives and beliefs. One can appreciate Duffy’s honesty and caution yet still question the reasons for pursuing a line of investigation that requires such repeated caveats.

Against its title, The Voices of Morebath is less about personal voices than religious forms. Its strengths are those of The Stripping of the Altars; its weaknesses are those of the “fashions” of historical revisionism about which Duffy himself expresses some skepticism. The turn to voice obscures the point made crystal clear in his earlier book and in the talk through which I first encountered his research on Morebath: for Duffy, the Reformation was a bad thing.

Again, he is no simple-minded polemicist. He acknowledges the deficiencies of medieval Catholicism and the strengths of the Protestant critique, particularly with respect to the accessibility of Scripture. Still, for Duffy, the Reformation brought a drastic flattening out of the rich, symbolic devotional and communal world of late-medieval Catholicism. For partisans on either side of this divide, the issue of agency—whether the common people of England, let us say, embraced the Reformation or had it rudely forced on them—is at best secondary to the issue of the substantive truth value of the two formal spiritual orientations. And all historians, even secular ones, have some partisan stake in this issue.

The Reformation has a prominent place in a broader progressive narrative of the triumph of reason and liberty over superstition and authority. The secularization of intellectual life in postwar America celebrated by David Hollinger, for example, may have shut Protestants out of the enlightened present, but even a hardcore secularist like Hollinger would acknowledge the significant role of the Reformers in the advancement of enlightenment in the past. Catholicism remains the “other” of this story, and consequently the “other” of a profession dedicated to the legitimation of modernity.

Duffy does neither his partisan Catholic cause nor the larger debate much good by framing his position in terms of human agency. The willing adoption of the Reformation by powerful English nobles no more proves the truth of Protestantism than the loyalty of the Spanish nobles proves the truth of Catholicism. A work like The Stripping of the Altars is an indispensable reminder of the world we have lost, but it is not particularly helpful as a guide to whether that world is best left lost. A work like The Voices of Morebath is positively harmful in its attempt to translate the world-historical transformation of the Reformation into one man’s personal story of loss and accommodation. History has said all that it can on the subject. It is now a matter for theologians and philosophers.

Like Orson Welles after Citizen Kane or Spike Lee after Do the Right Thing, Eamon Duffy carries the burden of having created a masterpiece far in advance of the decline in his powers of productivity. Sometimes productivity does more harm than good. The Voices of Morebath bears the stamp of a great historian embarked on a minor professional exercise.

Christopher Shannon is the author most recently of A World Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Rowman & Littlefield).