Book Interview: When one fascination leads to a wealth of realisations

Eamon Duffy once believed he had a vocation to the priesthood, instead he became an expert on Christian history, he tells Michael Duggan

Eamon Duffy specialised in the history of the English Reformation, becoming one of the acknowledged giants of the field. Picture: Jon Hirsch

When the now professor, Eamon Duffy, moved with his family from Ireland to Birmingham in 1961, at the age of 13, he had barely been out of his home town of Dundalk. His father, a boiler maker for the Great Northern Railway, had been offered a job in England’s second city when the works in the Co Louth town closed down.

Eamon had no idea of what to expect of life in England. What he got was “a huge opening up” in the possibilities ahead of him. He was sent to St Phillip’s, a grammar school on the other side of town, run by priests from the Birmingham Oratory. Eamon joined “the arty set” at the school and found himself in a place of intellectual liberation, tolerance, encouragement: The priests there gave him his first vision of “people living the scholarly life in community. I found that deeply attractive. I thought at first that I had a vocation to the Oratory. Then I met my wife and realised I didn’t. But university life, in a way, supplied what I thought I saw in the priests.”