ABSTRACT
The recent reassessment of the sixteenth-century Reformation, to which Eamon Duffy has contributed with such distinction, is commonly associated, like other revisionist enterprises, with an emphasis on short-term contingencies over long-term trends. The English Reformation becomes a political event, not a long-term process, at least in its causation. It may therefore seem paradoxical to argue that this historiographical shift has triggered the need to reexamine the long-term religious history of individual communities over many centuries, after as well as before the central Reformation decades. Yet Dr Duffy’s own career has shown the value of working back from the eighteenth century, and in particular the conditions facing both Roman Catholicism and pietism in that period, to the late medieval church.1
