![]() ![]() ![]() He begins, not as the reformers did, with the Word, but with the Catholic liturgy. In the first part of the book, Duffy wants to show the vitality and appeal of late medieval Catholicism and to prove that it exerted a diverse and vigorous hold over the imagination and loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation. It is this lost physical and mental world, as well as this desolation, which Eamon Duffy discovers and, wishing it had been otherwise, movingly describes. For Catholics, the desecration threatened the end of mediation, propitiation and spiritual solace: the loss of community between the dead and the living. But the loss and profanation of the treasures donated over centuries was nothing compared to the shattering of the beliefs they had symbolised. The images and altars, the dooms and roods of the parish churches, the towers and cloisters of the religions houses were desecrated. At the Reformation a world was lost that could never be recovered. ![]()
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