Retrieving the glory of the Middle Ages

Royal Books and Holy Bones
by Eamon Duffy, Bloomsbury, £25

There are historians – and then there is Eamon Duffy. This book resoundingly demonstrates, yet again, why the veteran Cambridge professor is quite unlike the rest. From 1992’s The Stripping of the Altars to 2001’s The Voices of Morebath, Duffy has revelled in punching irreparable holes through accepted wisdom, and this book is no exception.

Royal Books and Holy Bones spans a vast swathe of Western intellectual, religious and social development, from the castrate Origen of Alexandria’s prodigious compilation of the Hexapla in the early 200s to King Henry VIII and his heirs seizing the English Church for the Tudor Crown. Despite the dauntingly wide territory, Duffy sets a sure course through it all.