In this issue we have an extract from the introduction by Professor Eamon Duffy to a new edition of his groundbreaking work of history, The Stripping of the Altars. It was a book that changed perceptions of the Reformation in England; no subsequent account of the period can fail to be aware of it. Formerly, the lazy assumption behind nearly all histories of the Reformation was that it succeeded because the Catholic Church was corrupt and deserved to fail, or as that seminal work, 1066 and All That, observed, “England was bound to be CofE anyway”.