It is 26 years since Eamon Duffy changed the way that readers of history looked at England on the eve of the Reformation, through his The Stripping of the Altars. Many of the essays here also challenge easy assumptions. All of them are written with a clarity and fluency, humour and humanity that make reading them a pleasure. * Christopher Howse, Daily Telegraph * Erudite but never unapproachable and laced with a dry wit, [Duffy's] essays are essential reading for those with an interest in how people in the past expressed their faith * Sunday Times * Tremendous ... This is a book for the general reader , spiced throughout with Duffy's profound scholarly understanding of the giant subjects with which each essay grapples * Church Times * [Duffy's] extraordinary depth of knowledge is, throughout these essays, lit for his reader by his sense not of what medieval Christians thought but of what they believed, felt, feared, and, above all, did ... [his] learning and judgement, and the clarity of his prose, have done a great deal to counter the lazy, but alas, still common assumption that "medieval" is a synonym for "barbarous". * TLS *