In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about.Tracing the fraught history of religious change in Tudor England, and the retellings of that history to shape a protestant national identity, once again he emphasizes the importance of the study of late medieval religion and material culture for our understanding of this most formative and fascinating of eras. Getting to grips with the misconceptions, discontinuities and dilemmas which have dogged the history of Tudor religion, he traces the lived experience of Catholicism in an age of upheaval: from what it meant to be a Catholic in early Tudor England; through the nature of militant Catholicism at the height of the conflict; to the after-life of Tudor Catholicism and the ways in which the 'old religion' was remembered and spoken about in the England of Shakespeare. Duffy writes at all times with grace, elegance and wit as he questions prejudices and myths about the Reformation, to demonstrate that the truth about the past is never pure nor simple.

List of Plates and FiguresPart I: Reformation UnravelledIntroduction1. Reformation, Counter-reformation and the English nation2. Reformation Unravelled: Facts and FictionsPart II: The Material Culture of Early Tudor Catholicism3. The Parish, Piety and Patronage: the Evidence of Roodscreens4. Salle Church and the Reformation 5. The End of It All: Medieval Church Goods and the 1552 ConfiscationsPart III: Two Cardinals6. John Fisher and the Spirit of his Age7. The Religion of John Fisher8. Rome and Catholicity in mid-Tudor England9. Cardinal Pole and Archbishop CranmerPart IV: Catholic Voices10. The Conservative Voice in the English Reformation11. Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's EnglandNotesAcknowledgementsIndex