Three Good Books That Revised History

In a previous post I critiqued an author for wasting enormous talent trying to write something “new.” In this column I will discuss three books that ushered in new ways of thinking, but did it better. These books aren’t easy reading, but their density is proportional to their content. (I can cover three books because praise takes less space than criticism.) Two were readings assigned in class; the other was recommended.

The Stripping of the Altars

The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy[1] overturned decades, perhaps centuries, of stultifying complacency about the Protestant Reformation in England (including my own). Duffy challenged the widespread presumption that the Reformation brought a true and purified religion to a country gripped by ritual, magic and saint worship—in other words, the Catholic Church.

While the title refers to the destruction of the traditional church under Protestant kings Henry VIII and Edward VI, more than half the book is devoted to describing Christianity before the Reformation. Duffy shows how the Catholic Church was woven into the texture of people’s lives through holy days, celebrations, pageants, processions, veneration of saints, deathbed donations, prayers, and, above all, the miraculous Eucharist. Overseeing that world and everyone in it were the saints, from the Virgin Mary to little-known local martyrs, all of whom could help people in various kinds of trouble.

Duffy stresses the “vitality and popularity” of this traditional religion; he argues that there was no major distinction between the religion of the elite and “folk” religion (in other words, common people’s veneration of the saints was not succumbing to “magic”); and he does not consider pre-Reformation religion as “exhausted” or “decadent,” thus ripe for reform.[2] He argues that the switch to Protestantism was not as easy or quick as many have assumed. Former Catholics’ “compliance should not be taken to imply agreement with the Protestant theology” that prevailed in the Church of England.

On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 155-1750.

On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550-1750 by Steve Hindle[3] revises our understanding of the poor laws in England. Hindle’s work is in line with new scholarship recognizing that passing a law doesn’t tell us much about how it is implemented. The “Old English Poor Law” (in effect from 1601 to 1834) was carried out locally, parish by parish. To understand its operation one must examine it locally. Hindle received a grant to spend six years (an impressive grant!) studying parish records across England.

The English poor law was unprecedented in Europe because it was paid for by taxpayers, not charity, and it allowed needy people to receive relief if they were deserving.  But who was deserving? Negotiations to answer that question involved a wide range of characters including the poor themselves, parish overseers, local magistrates, and justices of the peace.

Hindle not only shows us the complexity of these negotiations (and the uncertainty as well, which explains the question mark in his title), he also reveals the changing attitudes toward the poor as the 1600s moved along. As tax rates for relief rose, parishes devised ways to restrict people from getting relief. These “policies of deterrence—the parish badge, the compulsory apprenticeship of children, the workhouse tests—were designed to make life on the parish as unattractive as possible.”^[4] Thus Hindle gives us a microscopic view of the problems that would trouble Britain at least until 1834 and possibly till the twentieth century.

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

In Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,[5] David W. Blight pioneered a new historical concept called collective memory. I have problems with that concept, which I discussed here, but that takes nothing away from Blight’s achievement.  He explains how Americans experienced the aftermath of the Civil War and how that experience (which he calls memory) led to Jim Crow and to racial problems that may be with us today.

After the war, two major narratives battled with one another over how Americans would interpret and remember the war. One was the message of freedom and emancipation, the end of slavery. The other was the message of sympathy to the Confederacy for its “lost cause.”

Blight gives us poignant pictures of how the “lost cause” narrative swallowed up the message of emancipation. Writers, historians, politicians and others began to emphasize the similarity of the Blue and the Gray (both sides died for a cause, with the cause becoming vaguer as the years went by); they romanticized slavery (the Daughters of the Confederacy tried to create statues across the South commemorating the slave “mammy”); and they ignored the rapidly growing number of lynchings as white southerners used terror to control blacks. The process reached its apotheosis when the great Progressive, Woodrow Wilson, ordered racial segregation in the Post Office and other federal agencies. Emancipation was over.

[1] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

[2] Duffy, 5.

[3] Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550-1750. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[4] Hindle, 453.

[5] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).