Using the detailed churchwarden's accounts maintained by Sir Christopher Trychay, the vicar of Morebath's parish, Duffy recounts the religious and social implications of the Reformation in a small conservative Catholic community through the reign of Henry VIII, during the violent 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion, and into the Elizabethan era.

Lucy Wooding, a historian of the Tudor period, called the work "invaluable" as "a contribution to debate on the English Reformation" and suggested that Duffy's own views had developed during his time writing the book.

Robert M. Kingdon, a historian of the Reformation, acknowledged that the number of wider conclusions that could be drawn from the book was limited but lauded Duffy's "remarkable empathy and impressive technical research skills".

[2][3][4][5][6] Religion played a significant role in the daily lives of Morebath's residents, though they conformed their practices to the oscillating theologies imposed under the monarchies of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.

These records have been utilized by scholars researching 16th-century England since a version of them was first published in J. Erskine Binney's 1904 The Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon, 1520–1573.

[2] Eamon Duffy, an Irish Catholic historian of British religion,[10] had first encountered Trychay's records during his research for the 1992 book, The Stripping of the Altars.

Duffy's scholarship contended that the Reformation was "a violent disruption, not the natural fulfilment, of most of what was vigorous in late medieval piety and religious practice".

[16] The book details the Devon village of Morebath, its parish, and the priest Sir Christopher Trychay as they reluctantly accept English Protestantism despite their Catholic sympathies.

By 1570, when Trychay's ministry was coming to a close, the secular government's presence in Morebath is portrayed as more intrusive while the saints and their associated objects, once familiar and venerated, are absent.

[2][note 4] Upon release, due to popular demand for work by Duffy, The Voices of Morebath sold better than Yale University Press had anticipated.

Thomas acknowledged Duffy's efforts to mitigate this narrow perspective, and recommended the fourth impression – with its "tantalizing" account of the sword attack on Trychay – to readers on the grounds that it indicated a greater diversity of religious persuasions in Reformation Morebath.

[16] Kingdon, writing in a 2003 review for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, said the book was limited in what conclusions it could claim regarding the English Reformation due to its reliance on a single source but lauded Duffy's "remarkable empathy and impressive technical research skills".

Collinson, calling the work "a microhistorical threnody and lament", identified "Trychay's centrality" in the 2001 book as the result of "our almost total dependence on his accounts" following the destruction of Morebath's other records in the Second World War.

Referencing "Duffy's suggestion that women were perhaps treated better in an era where the Virgin and St. Sidwell were widely venerated", Wooding said it could remain only "interesting speculation".

[7] J. P. D. Cooper, in a review for the Sixteenth Century Journal, called it "a splendid book: a good detective story, offering fine writing and some valuable reflections on the nature of the community in the Tudor era".

[20] The Voices of Morebath has been recognized as a micro-history in the tradition established by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's seminal 1975 book Montaillou on 14th-century French Pyrenean peasants.

Holding that "it is hard to think of Voices of Morebath as a masterpiece equal to Greene's novel", Carlson said that both books "give us the life of an all-too-human priest, an insignificant figure in the grand scheme of history but someone nonetheless rather representative of his time".

Following the book's publication, an English Heritage sign was installed in Morebath and the church reported that hundreds of people have come to visit after reading about it in Duffy's work.

An editorial in The Guardian positively compared this proposal to Duffy's description of church ales and suggested "historic places of communal worship can still find a social vocation in the 21st century".

[32] In a 2021 review for Church Times on Duffy's essay collection A People's Tragedy: Studies in Reformation, Richard Chartres, former Church of England Bishop of London, credited Duffy's work in The Stripping the Altars and The Voices of Morebath with revising the understanding of English religion on the eve of Reformation and resistance among the laity and clergy to early Protestantism.

[33] Robert Lutton's Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre‐Reformation England, published in 2006 by the Royal Historical Society and Boydell Press, explicitly responded to Duffy's The Voices of Morebath.

In detailing religious practices in Tenterden's parish during the period of Lollardy in early 16th-century England up to 1535, Lutton emulated Duffy's use of a parochial study.

[34] Sheilagh O'Brien, a historian at the University of Divinity's St Francis College, identified The Voices of Morebath as an example of a micro-history on the English Reformation that is accessible to readers who do not find history compelling or encountered it inaccurately portrayed in popular works of fiction.