Eamon Duffy

This engrossing book encompasses the extraordinary history of the papacy, from its beginnings to the present day. This new edition covers the unprecedented resignation of Benedict XVI and the election of the first Argentinian pope. Praise for the earlier editions: “Duffy enlivens the long march through church history with anecdotes that bring the different pontiffs to life. Saints and Sinners...

This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion, showing that late-medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but a strong and vigorous tradition. For this edition, Duffy has written a new introduction reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period. "A mighty and momentous book: a book to be read and re-read, pondered...

Personal prayer books and the jottings in their margins tell us about their owners and about life in late medieval and Reformation England. In this richly illustrated book, religious historian Eamon Duffy discusses the Book of Hours, unquestionably the most intimate and most widely used book of the later Middle Ages. He examines surviving copies of the personal prayer books...

In this text, a Reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep-farming village where 33 families worked the difficult land on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only...

The renowned author of The Stripping of the Altars takes a new and controversial look at the reign of England’s "Bloody Mary". The reign of Mary Tudor has been remembered as an era of sterile repression, when a reactionary monarch launched a doomed attempt to reimpose Catholicism on an unwilling nation. Above all, the burning alive of more than 280...

Of all the men who have served the Catholic Church as pope, who were the ten most influential? The Bishops of Rome have been Christianity's most powerful leaders for nearly two millennia, and their influence has extended far beyond the purely spiritual. The popes have played a central role in the history of Europe and the wider world, not only...