Libri di Eamon Duffy Migliori da leggere e Consigliati

La controversa, e gloriosa storia del papato si snoda in questo libro da San Pietro a Giovanni Paolo II, lungo tutti gli imperi e i regni che si sono susseguiti in 2000 anni di storia. Attraverso le vite di 261 papi e di 34 antipapi, la ricostruzione dei sinodi e dei coclavi, e grazie all’analisi tanto della diplomazia e della politica vaticane, quanto della promozione artistica e musicale, “La grande storia dei papi” sottolinea l’importanza decisiva del papato nella storia politica e culturale dell’Italia e dell’intero Occidente.

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 and revered; a subtle, profound book written with passion and eloquence, and with masterly control.”-J. J. Scarisbrick, The Tablet “Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”-Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal “A magnificent scholarly achievement, a compelling read, and not a page too long to defend a thesis which will provoke passionate debate.”-Patricia Morison, Financial Times “Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated.”-Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books Winner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award

As an authority on the religion of medieval and early modern England, Eamon Duffy is preeminent. In his revisionist masterpiece The Stripping of the Altars, Duffy opened up new areas of research and entirely fresh perspectives on the origin and progress of the English Reformation. Duffy’s focus has always been on the practices and institutions through which ordinary people lived and experienced their religion, but which the Protestant reformers abolished as idolatry and superstition. The first part of A People’s Tragedy examines the two most important of these institutions: the rise and fall of pilgrimage to the cathedral shrines of England, and the destruction of the monasteries under Henry VIII, as exemplified by the dissolution of the ancient Anglo-Saxon monastery of Ely. In the title essay of the volume, Duffy tells the harrowing story of the Elizabethan regime’s savage suppression of the last Catholic rebellion against the Reformation, the Rising of the Northern Earls in 1569. In the second half of the book Duffy considers the changing ways in which the Reformation has been thought and written about: the evolution of Catholic portrayals of Martin Luther, from hostile caricature to partial approval; the role of historians of the Reformation in the emergence of English national identity; and the improbable story of the twentieth century revival of Anglican and Catholic pilgrimage to the medieval Marian shrine of Walsingham. Finally, he considers the changing ways in which attitudes to the Reformation have been reflected in fiction, culminating with Hilary Mantel’s gripping trilogy on the rise and fall of Henry VIII’s political and religious fixer, Thomas Cromwell, and her controversial portrayal of Cromwell’s Catholic opponent and victim, Sir Thomas More.