Royal Books and Holy Bones

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What to expect

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.

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.

Critics Review

  • 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.

    Daily Telegraph

  • 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

    Sunday Times

  • 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

    Church Times

  • [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”.

    TLS

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