Another Reason to take Latin seriously

One of my favourite blogs is that of Mary Beard, a Professor of Classics down the road at Cambridge and columnist and blogger of “It’s A Don’s Life”.

The book is pretty well a straight transcript of her blog from its beginning in April 2006 up the end of 2008. It’s a great hoot as well as from time to time giving a new and worthwhile slant on current issues by parking some classical analogues up against them.

And we all need to know what Romans wore under their togas of course.

Filed under: Book review

On losing ones symbols

The Lost Symbol (working title The Solomon Key) is of course Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster, which sold a million copies on its first day – and that’s before it’s out as a paperback.

This time it’s Freemasonry and in Washington. Robert Langdon is the good guy again, and there is the full cast you’d expect of castrati, lost sons, pyramids, codes, religious tomfoolery, stylistic horrors and grammatical howlers. So no surprise if it sells like hot cakes.

Far be it from me to spoil the plot, but you can decide for yourself whether the ending justifies the novel’s last word, Hope, if it involves reading the Bible as meaning that we are meant to be God after all.

I can’t imagine what Terry Eagleton would have to say, especially after a jar or two (I’m just reading his excellent Reason, Faith and Revolution which brings back fond memories of studying English 30 something years ago when I remember him down the road at Wadham in a Marxist cap). Watch out by the way for his Gifford lectures on the God Debate next year.

Frankly, if anyone is losing it, it’s Brown. But he’ll be crying all the way to the bank. (Wordsmith worry: why do  people say “laughing all the way to the bank” – doesn’t make sense.)

Filed under: Book review, Uncategorized

Fires of Faith

I’ve just finished reading Eamonn Duffy’s Fires of Faith, a magisterial account of Catholicism’s reintroduction to England under Mary Tudor.

(Regular readers will remember that Duffy came to speak in Ely recently at a Topping event.)

It’s a showstopper of a book, combining well-researched and strongly argued historical analysis, with just a hint of the Counter Reformation Redivivus.

The historical part, which is admirably done as one would expect from the author of The Voices of Morebath, and The Stripping of the Altars, shows that under Mary

• Cardinal Pole was a world-class leader, nearly made Pope
• The re-Catholicisation was efficiently done – so that for instance a high percentage of the higher clergy didn’t accept the change back to Protestantism under Elizabeth
• The burnings were also an efficient and effective campaign, being scaled down by Mary’s death because they had silenced most outward opposition
• The inquisition was merciful in that often made it possible for people to conform on minimal professions of faith (Paraphrase: “Do you accept that Christ is not absent from his eucharist?” “Yes” “Clear off before you say anything else and conform outwardly and you’ll be OK)
• The use of printed materials was far more effective than has been claimed in the scholarly consensus hitherto
• In fact, the English Revival was a very model of what Catholic Counter-Reformation should be and in a sense even invented it for the rest of Europe (Duffy’s parting shot.)

Now this is not the picture painted by say A G Dickens, but Duffy is right to challenge that, and it also makes sense that the public at large was probably not unhappy to go back the old ways that the Reformation had quite destructively interrupted and were not at all as moribund as their detractors made them out to be. As a historian of sorts I have to salute him.

The difficulty for me is that there is just a hint in the book of us and them, of showing that ‘our lot’ did well after all. Catholics who refuse the Elizabethan Reformation are noble conscientious objectors. Protestants who refuse the Marian Reformation are hard-core intransigent separatists.

And then there is the issue, a vexed one as Duffy well realises, of how a historian can or should write about those times when man has been far from humane to man. A historian does have to stay with the history – I am not a fan of the sort of history that promotes our own ideas over the facts they are interpreting – and Protestants and Catholics alike seemed very ready to resort to patterns of repression we would condemn today.

But efficiency and burning alive do not sit well together in the discourse of today. If we – or I at any rate – am going to digest this book, it will have to be with some degree of discomfort about the practices adopted by both sides in the Reformation period, a willingness to say that they were wrong, a commitment to not do the same again – and a weather eye open for the ways in which I as a prelate of the presently established church perhaps patronise if not persecute the minorities of today (and make it inevitable perhaps that previous historians demonised the Marian regime and a present one needs to defend it).

Filed under: Book review, Catholic, Counter-Reformation, Eamonn Duffy, Mary, Reformation