Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy FSA FBA KSG
Duffy in 2010
Born	(1947-02-09) 9 February 1947 (age 79) Dundalk, Ireland
Academic background
Education	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) The Voices of Morebath (2001)

Eamon Duffy FSA FBA KSG (born 9 February 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. After grade school, Duffy graduated from the University of Hull in 1968 with a BA plus honours, then from Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1972 with a PhD, dissertation titled Joseph Berington and the English Catholic Cisalpine movement 1772-1803. His doctoral advisers were Owen Chadwick and Gordon Rupp. Duffy then completed a DDiv at Cambridge in 1994.

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 which needed a multi generational Long Reformation to reshape Britain into a Protestant society.

He was president of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain from 2002 to 2004.

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, the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, and the University of Notre Dame.
• Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2012)
• Honorary Canon, Ely Cathedral (2014)

Works

References

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

Wikiquote has quotations related to Eamon Duffy.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eamon Duffy.

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