More precisely, two reviews of books about Reformation England. I haven’t read either of the books, but the reviews are interesting in themselves. First, Craig Burrell on Eamon Duffy’s Fires of Faith, a study of the brief and tragic (from several points of view) reign of Mary Tudor. Like, I suppose, most Protestants (or at least those on the British branch of the tree), I grew up accepting the view of “Bloody Mary” as a monster waging a last-ditch effort on behalf of evil against good. That there was anything at all to be said in her favor did not occur to me, nor did I realize that her half-sister Elizabeth was every bit as ready as she to have people killed for their religion, until my interest in the Catholic Church prompted me to look at the other side of the story. Fires of Faith seems to be a word in her favor.
Coincidentally…wait, they’re both Canadian, so probably it’s Not A Coincidence…the blogger and historian who calls herself Alias Clio (or else Musette, Clio’s mortal servant) has begun posting again at her blog, The Other World, and her first post is a review of Wolf Hall, a novel based on the life of Thomas Cromwell, known to admirers of A Man for All Seasons and of Saint Thomas More as one of the villians of that drama. Hilary Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall, apparently set out to rehabilitate Cromwell by portraying him as a sort of early Modern Man who has no use for all that religious mumbo-jumbo and wants to free the state from entanglement with it. A.C. comments very astutely on that.
I had previously seen this novel reviewed by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic, who, not surprisingly, thought it wonderful, and, a bit surprisingly, described Thomas More as “one of history’s wickedest men,” which seems rather much even for Hitchens. It is a little peculiar that someone like Hitchens would prefer the ruthless and unscrupulous Cromwell to the principled More–or, well, it would be peculiar if one didn’t know Hitchens to be unhinged on the subject of religion. Alias Clio’s review is much more insightful:
For Wolf Hall is a Whig history: it offers us a Cromwell much like ourselves as our eye into the past, while we are the novel’s heroes.
I used to have The Other World in my list of external links here, but removed it when it seemed to have gone silent for good. I’ll have to put it back, and make several other updates to that list. I have a sort of informal rule that a blog which hasn’t been updated for a year will be removed, and I’m sorry to see that it’s been almost that long since the last post at Thursday Night Gumbo.
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment