Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity
Ebook
In these vivid and approachable essays Eamon Duffy engages with some of the central aspects of Western religion in the thousand years between the decline of pagan Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation.
In the process he opens windows on the vibrant and multifaceted beliefs and practices by which medieval people made sense of their world: the fear of death and the impact of devastating pandemic, holy war against Islam and the invention of the blood libel against the Jews, provision for the afterlife and the continuing power of the dead over the living, the meaning of pilgrimage and the evolution of Christian music. Duffy unpicks the stories of the Golden Legend and Yale University's mysterious Voynich manuscript, discusses the cult of 'St' Henry VI and explores childhood in the Middle Ages.
Accompanying the book are a collection of full colour plates which further demonstrate the richness of late medieval religion. In this highly readable collection Eamon Duffy once more challenges existing scholarly narratives and sheds new light on the religion of Britain and Europe before and during the Reformation.
Eamon Duffy returns to the themes of his landmark book The Stripping of the Altars in this much-awaited exploration of Christianity in medieval England.
Successful author with a strong track record: Reformation Divided and Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition both sold well
The author is well known as a prominent Reformation scholar and Emeritus Professor at Cambridge University
Duffy writes regularly for the London Review of Books, TLS and other publications, as well as appearing on radio programmes
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Royal Books and Holy Bones
BOOKS
1 Early Christian Impresarios
2 Books Held by Kings
3 The Golden Legend
4 Secret Knowledge - or a Hoax?
5 The Psalms and Lay Piety
CRISES AND MOVEMENTS
6 Plague and Historical Memory
7 The Rise of Sacred Song
8 Holy Terror
9 The Cradle Will Rock: Histories of Childhood
SAINTS
10 Blood Libel: The Murder of William of Norwich
11 Sacred Bones and Blood
12 Treasures of Heaven: Saints and Their Relics
13 St Erkenwald
14 The Cult of 'St' Henry IV
15 The Dynamics of Pilgrimage in the Late Middle Ages
16 'Lady, Pray Thy Son for Me': Prayer to the Virgin in the Late Middle Ages
ON THE EVE OF THE REFORMATION
17 Provision Against Purgatory: Wingfield College, Suffolk
18 Monasticism and the Religion of the People: Crowland Abbey
19 The Four Latin Doctors: in the Late Middle Ages
20 The Reformation and the Alasbastermen
21 Brush for Hire: Lucas Cranach the Elder
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
A Note on the Author
Plate Section
It is 26 years since Eamon Duffy changed the way that readers of history looked at England on the eve of the Reformation, through his The Stripping of the Altars. Many of the essays here also challenge easy assumptions. All of them are written with a clarity and fluency, humour and humanity that make reading them a pleasure.
Erudite but never unapproachable and laced with a dry wit, [Duffy's] essays are essential reading for those with an interest in how people in the past expressed their faith
Tremendous … This is a book for the general reader , spiced throughout with Duffy's profound scholarly understanding of the giant subjects with which each essay grapples
[Duffy's] extraordinary depth of knowledge is, throughout these essays, lit for his reader by his sense not of what medieval Christians thought but of what they believed, felt, feared, and, above all, did ... [his] learning and judgement, and the clarity of his prose, have done a great deal to counter the lazy, but alas, still common assumption that "medieval" is a synonym for "barbarous".
- Title: Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity
- Author: Eamon Duffy
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
- Print Publication Date: 2018
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781472953223, 9781472953230, 1472953231, 1472953223
- Resource ID: LLS:9781472953223
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-05-15T04:29:47Z