The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 [Paperback]

Eamon Duffy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 1992

This book offers a fundamental challenge to much that has been written about the pre-Reformation church. Eamon Duffy recreates 15th-century English laypeople's experience of religion, revealing the richness and complexity of the Catholicism by which men and women structured their experience of the world and their hopes within and beyond it. He then tells the story of the destruction of that Church - the stripping of the altars - from Henry VIII's break with the papacy until the Elizabethan settlement. Bringing together theological, liturgical, literary and iconographic analysis with historical narrative, Duffy argues that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. The first part of the book reviews the main features of religious belief and practice up to 1536. Duffy examines the factors that contributed to the close lay engagement with the structures of late medieval Catholicism: the liturgy; the impact of literacy and printing on lay religious knowledge; the conventions and contents of lay prayer; the relation of orthodox religious practice and magic; the Mass and the cult of the saints; and the lay belief about death and the afterlife. In the second part of the book Duffy explores the impact of Protestant reforms on this traditional religion, providing evidence of popular discontent from medieval wills and from parish records. He documents the widespread opposition to Protestantism during the reigns of Henry and Edward, discusses Mary's success in reestablishng Catholicism and describes the public resistance to Elizabeth's dismantling of parochial Catholicism that did not wane until the late 1570s.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From reviews of the first edition:“A magnificent scholarly achievement [and] a compelling read.”—Patricia Morrison, Financial Times

“Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated. . . . Duffy’s analysis . . . carries conviction.”—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books

“This book will afford enjoyment and enlightenment to layman and specialist alike.”—Peter Heath, Times Literary Supplement

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and President of Magdalene College. He is the author of Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes and The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, both available in paperback from Yale University Press.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 666 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (December 23, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300060769
• ISBN-13: 978-0300060768
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,244,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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73 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Different Perspective on the English Reformation, November 9, 2006

By 

R. Post - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Paperback)

"The Stripping of the Altars", Eamon Duffy's erudite, meticulous yet flowing analysis of what he refers to as "traditional religion" in England in the years from 1400 to 1580 is a masterpiece of scholarship and also of presentation. Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge University, he states in his preface to the second edition (the book was originally published in 1992) that his intentions were academic and that he was himself surprised to find that it developed an audience among the general public. He should not have been so shocked. Leavened with anecdotes, storytelling, humor and engaging descriptions of the thoughts, customs and nature of life in those times, his work, while painstaking -- painfully so at times -- reads comfortably and absorbingly throughout most of its highly approachable 593 pages (plus bibliography and index).

Duffy's thesis is that, contrary to what has been taught and generally believed about the Protestant Reformation in England, satisfaction with the Roman Catholic "traditional" religion, its fêtes, rituals and observances was almost universal at the time of the Reformation and that the Reformation, itself, was imposed upon the people by royal and civil authority, not popular will. Early on and fairly enough, Duffy describes his irish Catholic background, yet while that outlook must be constantly borne in mind while reading his book, the fact is that he makes a convincing case.

He does so systematically, painting the nature of English existence at the time, largely rural, generally peaceful in the wake of the Hundred Year's War, isolated, provincial and soaked in pervasive religiosity. Suggesting that the abuses, indulgences and corruption of the Continental church had few echoes in England, Duffy works through the nature of categories of traditional practice -- liturgy, catechesis, mass, gild, prayers, primers (in preference to Bible study), and the sometimes cultish fixations on death and purgatory -- and in doing so creates an image of an idyllic world, cohesive, communal and warmly and constantly involved with its faith. In the process he uses plentiful plates and illustrations that correlate with specifics in the text and which, themselves, are a pleasure to review.

Voices around Henry VIII, who despite his quarrels with the papacy remained ambivalent about his religious identification, radicalized his policies in the persons of ranting Hugh Latimer and Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, culminating in 1533 in the ultimate break with the Roman church and, in the name of removing idolatrous objects, the subsequent eponymous stripping of the altars, art, and statuary of the churches and the destruction of abbeys and monasteries, a sad price to pay for the concepts of religious individualism and personal responsibility for salvation.

The reaction of the traditionalists was varied. Some resisted while others went underground or accommodated and accepted the new authority; however, given the opportunity, Duffy emphasizes, the "vast majority" of the people quickly reverted to traditional religion after the deaths of Henry in 1547 and of the young King Edward VI in 1553 and the brief accession to the throne of Catholic Mary Tudor. As the reign of Elizabeth I began in 1558 and the Protestant Church of England was reinstated, many quickly changed sides of the aisle again, but, Duffy asserts, the ultimate defeat of the traditionalists was the result only of lengthy systematic repression, an effort that finally subverted the true will of the people. (There is some irony in the fact that in two brief paragraphs Duffy passes over, almost with a "boys will be boys" flippancy, the burnings of "heretics" under the Marian regime.)

So be it. Duffy's is an interesting concept. Yet questions remain: Why if the dedication to traditional religion was so deep, did it virtually disappear in well less than a century as a significant factor in English life? Were the Protestant propagandists that convincing or their "draconian" measures that intimidating? To what extent was the acceptance of traditional religion itself, as opposed to deep faith, an accommodation to existing authority, its methods and its mores, and a reflection of humanity's characteristic inclination to adapt to surroundings and make the joyful best of them?

Those last are comments, not criticisms, issues that should not detract from appreciation of this work. "The Stripping of the Altars" is a magnificent book.

93 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars weep, weep, o Walsingham..., November 14, 2002

By 

J. Anderson (Monterey, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Paperback)

Eamon Duffy is hell-bent to demonstrate the meaning and legitimacy of traditional English piety, and succeeds by and large with smart scholarship, winningly original ideas, and fret-free, up-tempo prose. The book wears well a mediaevalist scholar's sympathetic penchant for the full color world of his subject; you have no trouble entering Duffy's exotic world. He knocks down the calumny of 'superstition' by REVEALING it with teaching. The Henrician religious revolution is exactingly covered, but forget your mild English sentiments here; the author means to prove his point and does relentlessly. England's masses did NOT rise up and demand what the King unfortunately demanded! Some of the local evidence unearthed by Duffy is among the most compelling in providing armament for his argument that Roman piety remained the daily staple of the common Englishman even as revolution was imposed by royal will. The last section --The Attack on Traditional Religion-- (including a final segment on Elizabeth I) is the best in the book- arguments are focused in, & the prose is clean and responsive. The book is a huge achievment, even at 650+ pages! A fetching bibliography provides extensive evidence of the openness of Duffy's scholarship, and is fascinating marginalia in its own right. Photo of the vandalised bas relief of the mass Sacrifice on the cover is completely moving. No faint-hearted history allowed.

104 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reformation-Era England Reconsidered, June 1, 2001

By 

Kevin Jones "Gentleman of Leisure" (Denver, CO, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Paperback)

The Stripping of the Altars is excellent in every way. Duffy has examined up parish records, scoured primary sources, and provided a superlative overall view of pre-Reformation English Catholicism.

The Lollards, minor pre-Lutheran dissenters whose influence, beliefs, and practices have been listed as evidence of tumult in the English church, are also succinctly covered. Duffy casts doubt on their reputation, which has sometimes been blown out of proportion by Protestant scholars.

Catholic life was flourishing in the era, as parish records attest. A major social center of the time, attendance was high and community guilds furnished the physical building, assisting funerals and providing some paid employment to the poor. The belief in Purgatory was hardly questioned, and practices of remembering the dead in prayer continued in many areas until the 1700s--despite sustained Protestant attack on the doctrine. Though Duffy does not bring in this particular work, Catholic purgatorial beliefs are featured in Shakespeare's Hamlet, written a generation after the official break with Rome.

Detailed, too, are the many devotional works of the period, which with the advent of the printing press had become inexpensive enough even for the lower middle class. He also counters some assertions that English Catholics were half-pagan, tracing many alleged "magical amulets" and incantations to their source: Christian liturgical practice and prayer. Most sorrowful are his photographs and catalogues of vandalized statuary and churches, whose desecration was strongly supported by Cramner, his iconoclastic lackeys--and very few others.

Whatever the Protestant movement was elsewhere, in England, at least, it was largely imposed from the top.