Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy FSA FBA KSG
Duffy in 2010
Born	(1947-02-09) 9 February 1947 Dundalk, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Hull University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Owen Chadwick Gordon Rupp
Academic work
Discipline	History
Sub-discipline	History of Christianity
Institutions	Magdalene College, Cambridge
Doctoral students	Paul C. H. Lim
Notable works	The Stripping of the Altars (1992)

Eamon Duffy FSA FBA KSG (born 1947) is an Irish historian. He is the Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and former president of Magdalene College.

Early life

Duffy was born on 9 February 1947, in Dundalk, Ireland. He describes himself as a "cradle Catholic". He was educated at St Philip's School and the University of Hull. He undertook postgraduate research at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral advisers were Owen Chadwick and Gordon Rupp.

Academic career

Duffy specialises in 15th- to 17th-century religious history of Britain. He is also a former member of the Pontifical Historical Commission. His work has done much to overturn the popular image of late-medieval Catholicism in England as moribund, and instead presents it as a vibrant cultural force. On weekdays from 22 October to 2 November 2007, he presented the BBC Radio 4 series 10 Popes Who Shook the World – those popes featured were Peter, Leo I, Gregory I, Gregory VII, Innocent III, Paul III, Pius IX, Pius XII, John XXIII, and John Paul II.

Duffy moved to Magdalene College in the University of Cambridge in 1979, and was professor of the history of Christianity from 2003 to 2014. Since 2014 he has been Emeritus Professor. In 2004 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

Prizes and awards

• Longman–History Today Award for book of the year (1994): The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580
• Hawthornden Prize for Literature (2002): The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village
• Honorary fellow, St Mary's College, Twickenham (2003). (He later resigned from the position in protest of management decisions at the college made by its principal, Philip Esler)
• President of the Ecclesiastical History Society (2004–2005)
• Honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Hull, and King's College London, and from the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto
• Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2012)
• Honorary Canon, Ely Cathedral (2014)

Books

• Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher (1989), with Brendan Bradshaw
• The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400 to c.1580 (1992; subsequent editions in 2005 and 2022)
• Saints and Sinners, a History of the Popes. Yale University Press. 1997. ISBN 0-300-07332-1.
• The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2001; subsequent edition in 2003) ISBN 978-0300091854 (2001) ISBN 978-0300098259 (2003)
• "The Shock of Change: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Elizabethan Church of England", in Anglicanism and the Western Catholic Tradition (2003)
• Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition (2004; subsequent edition in 2006) ISBN 978-0826474797 (2004) ISBN 978-0826476654 (2006)
• Walking to Emmaus (2006)
• Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (2006)
• Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (2009)
• Ten Popes Who Shook the World (2011)
• Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (2012) ISBN 1441181172
• Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants, and the Conversion of England (2017)
• The Hope That Is Within You – Eamon Duffy in Conversation with Raymond Friel (2017)
• Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity (2018) ISBN 9781472953230
• John Henry Newman: A Very Brief History (2019)
• A People's Tragedy: Studies in Reformation (2020) ISBN 978-1-4729-8385-5

Further reading

• Eamon Duffy, "Far from the Tree" (review of Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780199995356), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 4 (8 March 2018), pp. 28–29.

External links

• Duffy's faculty page
• PBS interview with Duffy
• Red Cross Lecture 2015: Fact, Fiction And The Tudor Past