It’s been both an incredibly joyful and stressful summer! I haven’t been plowing through as much reading as I would’ve liked, but life’s threw some chaos my way so I forgive myself.
After finishing Mary I by John Edwards, I took up Nicholas Orme’s Going to Church in Medieval England. It was exactly what I had hoped it would be: a description of the services and experience of services in the later Medieval English parish church. Although I’ve studied material adjacent and connected with the English Reformation, it was incredibly helpful to clarify and explicate the experience of Catholicism as I am an atheist raised in a nonreligious household by a nominally Jewish father and nominally Protestant mother.
Currently I’m working my way through Jeri McIntosh’s From Heads of Households to Heads of State about the household symbolism and functionality of then-Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. At the gym I’ve started listening to Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars but I might put halt to that as I’d prefer to be making marginal notes and give myself time to throughly digest such a hefty volume.