The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Paperback)

~ Dr. Eamon Duffy (Author) "This book attempts two tasks usually carried out separately, and by at least two different sets of practitioners..." (more)
Key Phrases: abrogated days, patronal image, propicius esto, Middle Ages, Holy Week, Palm Sunday (more...)

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

Product Description

This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people’s experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows 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. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period.
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
“[An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal

See all Editorial Reviews

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Product Details Paperback: 700 pages Publisher: Yale University Press; 2nd edition (May 10, 2005) Language: English ISBN-10: 0300108281 ISBN-13: 978-0300108286 Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,793 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in these categories: (What's this?) #2 in  Books > History > Europe > England > Medieval #7 in  Books > History > Europe > England > Tudor & Stuart #18 in  Books > History > Europe > Ireland

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

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First Sentence:
This book attempts two tasks usually carried out separately, and by at least two different sets of practitioners. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
abrogated days, patronal image, propicius esto, symple people, fifteen oes, mortuary provision, late medieval laity, holy loaf, many gilds, sepulchre ceremonies, catechetical programme, village gilds, laudable ceremonies, lent veil, sepulchre lights, late medieval men, north screen, annual obit, parish gilds, south screen, printed primers, affective tradition, helper saints, late medieval cult, traditional primers

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Middle Ages, Holy Week, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Blessed Virgin, Long Melford, Ten Articles, Margery Kempe, Golden Legend, Image of Pity, Lord's Prayer, King's Book, Lord Jesus Christ, East Anglia, Ten Commandments, Ars Moriendi, John the Baptist, Books of Hours, Mary Magdalene, Sussex Wills, Wynkyn de Worde, Tudor England, Pope Trental, Robert Reynes, Yorkshire Writers

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Books on Related Topics (learn more)

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English Reformations by Christopher Haigh Discusses: laudable ceremonies Long Melford Ten Articles The Ties that Bound by Barbara A. Hanawalt Discusses: many gilds village gilds parish gilds English Spirituality by Gordon Mursell Discusses: fifteen oes catechetical programme parish gilds The Voices of Morebath by Dr. Eamon Duffy Discusses: abrogated days patronal image lent veil Loading...

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Customer Reviews

21 Reviews 5 star:  (13) 4 star:  (4) 3 star:  (2) 2 star:  (1) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review 4.3 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 71 of 75 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    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. 88 of 95 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 (REAL NAME)    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. 34 of 34 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 (REAL NAME)    "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.		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for Anglicans Duffy demonstrates the reluctance of the English people to adopt the Protestant measures implemented by the crown. Read more Published 16 days ago by Taylor Marshall 4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Study on the Reformation and the Catholic Church in England This is a classic written by one of the preeminent historians of the Reformation. The first half, and pretty much the majority of the book focuses on teh Catholic Church prior to... Read more Published 7 months ago by Heather 5.0 out of 5 stars Received history rewritten. A beautifully written reexamination of the history of the reformation in England, which convincingly undermines the history taught to generations of schoolchildren. Published 7 months ago by Norma Paige 5.0 out of 5 stars The Stripping Away of 400 Years of Propaganda Through careful evaluation of primary sources Eamon Duffy develops the thesis and affirms the reality that the Reformation in England was no reformation at all, but a top-down... Read more Published 16 months ago by L. Mack Hall 4.0 out of 5 stars Of Medievalists and Monarchs The 600+ pages of THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS lie beside me now, their once-smooth softbound spine wrinkled and creased, its bends evidencing my progress from cover to cover... Read more Published on February 8, 2006 by WILLIAM H FULLER 5.0 out of 5 stars Great post-revisionist history of the English Reformation In historiography, it is sometimes difficult to say where revisionism ends and post-revisionism begins. Read more Published on April 28, 2005 by Matthew Hobbs 3.0 out of 5 stars Mixed Feelings I have mixed feelings about Stripping of the Altars. There's no question it's painstakingly well researched. But I wish more effort would have gone into editing. Read more Published on December 27, 2004 by Mark Marshall 5.0 out of 5 stars More evidence that history really is written by the victors. Mr. Duffy's book was, in many ways, shocking, but mostly for its decisive demonstration that the popularly understood motives for the English Reformation are in fact grossly... Read more Published on June 18, 2004 3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, well researched, but ultimately unconvincing This book attempts to present a revisionist account of the Reformation in England. It argues convincingly that there was a great deal of popular support for Roman Catholic ritual... Read more Published on April 30, 2001 by S. Gustafson 1.0 out of 5 stars YAWN!! This was a required text for a English Reformation that I am taking. This book was a compleate drag to read. Read more Published on February 26, 2001 by Christopher Plummer Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 2nd edition (May 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300108281
• ISBN-13: 978-0300108286
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #18,793 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #2 in	Books > History > Europe > England > Medieval
  #7 in	Books > History > Europe > England > Tudor & Stuart
  #18 in	Books > History > Europe > Ireland

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 75 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

88 of 95 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

34 of 34 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 (REAL NAME)

"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.