The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vols I and II

Abstract

skew the historical evidence. He expresses his “regret” that the considerable popularity of Mantel’s books and their subsequent adaptation for television has “given her fictional treatment of the Henrician Reformation a distinctive kind of authority,” thereby bringing More’s name into disrepute. Duffy’s reservations about the accuracy of Mantel’s interpretations are certainly justified. However, it is telling that Duffy offers far less criticism of another popular fictional work on the same subject – Robert Bolt’s 1960 “masterpiece,” A Man for all Seasons. As Duffy himself acknowledges, Bolt’s work is equally guilty of propagating a false image of More: his portrayal of More as a “liberal individualist concerned above all with personal integrity” is no less fictional than Mantel’s (nor, arguably, is Bolt’s caricatured portrait of Cromwell as a manipulative bully). However, Duffy largely absolves Bolt of these crimes, arguing that “whatever its historical shortcomings, Bolt’s brilliant picture of More as the advocate of individual conscience caught the public imagination, and the success of the film fed a striking revival of interest in More and his times.” Surely Mantel’s work, which has helped energize scholarly research into Cromwell, is deserving of a similar pardon? Overall, A People’s Tragedy does not offer a substantially different interpretation of the English Reformation to that already well-established by Duffy in his previous work (and subsequently reinforced by a generation of revisionist and post-revisionist scholars). Nevertheless, the essays collected here offer a series of fascinating further reflections on that central theme, demonstrating the sheer variety and vitality of late medieval religion in England, as well as providing convincing explanations as to why it has taken historians so long to appreciate it fully.