The Stripping of the Altars
Encyclopedia
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 is a work of history written by Eamon Duffy
and published in 1992 by Yale University Press.
.
The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health prior to the English Reformation
. Duffy’s argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.
Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Feast days were celebrated, fasts solemnly observed, churches decorated, images venerated, candles lit and prayers for the dead recited with regularity. Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practiced by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. Earlier historians’ claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing ‘corporate’ nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.
Much previous historical work on the Reformation, says Duffy, assumed it was a straightforward progression from the decaying Catholicism to the more morally pure but also more functional Protestantism. Duffy acknowledges that his thesis demands explanation of how, given the popularity of Catholicism, Protestantism was able to wipe away centuries of accumulated tradition, and do so in an incredibly short space of time. Duffy does this by proposing what he feels are a number of salient explanations — the political power of the militant Protestant clergy undertaking visitations to England’s parishes and that continued loyalty to the monarch allowed the word of the King to play a significant role in influencing public behaviour. Duffy also articulates the fact that while Catholics had the capability of rebelling against laws and edicts
it was difficult for such rebellion to be sustained; there were simply no concepts of revolution or working-class solidarity by which Catholics could provide continued resistance to unpopular events.
The second part of Duffy’s book concentrates on the accelerated implementation of Protestantism in the mid sixteenth century. It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed. Duffy uncovers a succession of records, notes and images that individually reveal an assortment of changes to liturgy and custom but taken together build up to demonstrate a colossal change in English religious practice.
So we see how candlesticks and church plate had to be melted down and sold off, altar tables removed, rood screens defaced or torn down and chasubles unstitched. How walls were whitewashed, relics discarded and paintings of saints hidden in parishioners’ houses. And we also read how the other aspects of the Catholic community, such as the guild groups or particular local feast days, quickly collapsed without the economic or religious practices on which they depended. It was a painful process for Catholics, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of Catholics stripped of their familiar spiritual nourishment. (One of Duffy’s later studies, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, focuses on how one particular Devon
village reacted to these changes.)
Duffy also uses to the second section to highlight the brief flame of optimism felt by Catholics ignited by the reign of the Catholic Mary
from 1553 to 1558, a flame quickly extinguished by Mary’s death. But ultimately, the Marian reign is a secondary issue. Duffy’s narrative demonstrates how centuries of religious practice evaporated in the face of fierce centralist control.
. Writing in the New York Review of Books, British historian Maurice Keen
stated,
Writing in the London Review of Books
in 2002, Patrick Collinson
said that The Stripping of the Altars "opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism".
In a review of a new edition published in 2005, The Atlantic called it
, David Daniell, emeritus
professor
of English
at University College London
, criticises Duffy's belief that an English bible would have come about sooner or later, within the framework of pre-Reformation Catholicism, and that Nicholas Love
's translation of the The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
largely satisfied lay needs for the New Testament. Daniell claims that Love's book actually contained little of Christ's teaching and a large amount of invented material not in the Gospels. Daniell argues that:
When evaluating these claims and counterclaims one should keep in mind the extent to which parts of the Bible had been translated into English well before the 16th century, as well as the Biblical instruction conveyed through the religious theater that developed throughout the Middle Ages. Further, the popularity of the various forms of the Devotio Moderna
, which included the reading of Scripture, praying the Psalms, and such works as The Imitation of Christ in the years preceding the Reformation
, as well as the many sermons and homilies explicating sacred Scripture, delivered to the people through the Middle Ages (many of which are preserved to this day and so can make manifest the depth of Biblical teaching contained therein) indicate the extent to which the Bible's teaching reached the common person.
Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy is an Irish Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge, and former President of Magdalene College....
and published in 1992 by Yale University Press.
Summary of the book's argument
While its title suggests a focus on iconoclasm, its concerns are broader, dealing with the shift in religious sensibilities in English society between 1400 and 1580. In particular, the book is concerned with establishing, in intricate detail, the religious beliefs and practices of English society in the century or so preceding the reign of Henry VIIIHenry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
.
The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health prior to the English Reformation
English Reformation
The English Reformation was the series of events in 16th-century England by which the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church....
. Duffy’s argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.
Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Feast days were celebrated, fasts solemnly observed, churches decorated, images venerated, candles lit and prayers for the dead recited with regularity. Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practiced by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. Earlier historians’ claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing ‘corporate’ nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.
Much previous historical work on the Reformation, says Duffy, assumed it was a straightforward progression from the decaying Catholicism to the more morally pure but also more functional Protestantism. Duffy acknowledges that his thesis demands explanation of how, given the popularity of Catholicism, Protestantism was able to wipe away centuries of accumulated tradition, and do so in an incredibly short space of time. Duffy does this by proposing what he feels are a number of salient explanations — the political power of the militant Protestant clergy undertaking visitations to England’s parishes and that continued loyalty to the monarch allowed the word of the King to play a significant role in influencing public behaviour. Duffy also articulates the fact that while Catholics had the capability of rebelling against laws and edicts
Prayer Book Rebellion
The Prayer Book Rebellion, Prayer Book Revolt, Prayer Book Rising, Western Rising or Western Rebellion was a popular revolt in Cornwall and Devon, in 1549. In 1549 the Book of Common Prayer, presenting the theology of the English Reformation, was introduced...
it was difficult for such rebellion to be sustained; there were simply no concepts of revolution or working-class solidarity by which Catholics could provide continued resistance to unpopular events.
The second part of Duffy’s book concentrates on the accelerated implementation of Protestantism in the mid sixteenth century. It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed. Duffy uncovers a succession of records, notes and images that individually reveal an assortment of changes to liturgy and custom but taken together build up to demonstrate a colossal change in English religious practice.
So we see how candlesticks and church plate had to be melted down and sold off, altar tables removed, rood screens defaced or torn down and chasubles unstitched. How walls were whitewashed, relics discarded and paintings of saints hidden in parishioners’ houses. And we also read how the other aspects of the Catholic community, such as the guild groups or particular local feast days, quickly collapsed without the economic or religious practices on which they depended. It was a painful process for Catholics, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of Catholics stripped of their familiar spiritual nourishment. (One of Duffy’s later studies, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, focuses on how one particular Devon
Devon
Devon is a large county in southwestern England. The county is sometimes referred to as Devonshire, although the term is rarely used inside the county itself as the county has never been officially "shired", it often indicates a traditional or historical context.The county shares borders with...
village reacted to these changes.)
Duffy also uses to the second section to highlight the brief flame of optimism felt by Catholics ignited by the reign of the Catholic Mary
Mary I of England
Mary I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death.She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded Henry in 1547...
from 1553 to 1558, a flame quickly extinguished by Mary’s death. But ultimately, the Marian reign is a secondary issue. Duffy’s narrative demonstrates how centuries of religious practice evaporated in the face of fierce centralist control.
Critical reception
Upon its publication, the book was hailed an original and persuasive account of English Catholicism in the Late Middle AgesLate Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages was the period of European history generally comprising the 14th to the 16th century . The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern era ....
. Writing in the New York Review of Books, British historian Maurice Keen
Maurice Keen
Maurice Hugh Keen is a British historian specialising in the Middle Ages. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, where he lectured in Medieval history from 1961-2000.In 1984 he won the Wolfson History Prize for his book Chivalry....
stated,
Perhaps it takes an Irishman to offer Englishmen (and others) a convincing picture of the religion of the ordinary lay people of England in the age before the Reformation. ...The evocation of [medieval Roman Catholicism,] that older, pre-Reformation tradition and of what its observances meant to the laity of its time is the theme of the first part of Dr. Duffy's deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated study.
Writing in the London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
in 2002, Patrick Collinson
Patrick Collinson
Patrick Collinson CBE was an English historian, known as an authority on the Elizabethan era. His most influential work has been about Elizabethan Puritanism. He was Emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996...
said that The Stripping of the Altars "opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism".
In a review of a new edition published in 2005, The Atlantic called it
[A] vigorous and eloquent book, a work of daring revision and a masterpiece of the historical imagination.... At once meticulous and lush, The Stripping of the Altars patiently and systematically recovers the lost world of medieval English Catholicism. ...[W]hile the first two thirds of this book is a deeply textured work of historical anthropology, the last third is a gripping narrative history, as Duffy traces the way the English Reformation (a process supported by a tiny minority, and deeply if ineffectively opposed by a population cowed by the new and crushing force of the monarchy) eradicated a thousand years of tradition and ritual. ... Duffy's most significant contribution by far is to elucidate the fragility of even deeply rooted ways of life: he convincingly demonstrates that for better or worse, the Reformation was "a great cultural hiatus, which had dug a ditch, deep and dividing, between the English people and their past"—a past that over merely three generations became a distant world, impossible for them to look back on as their own.
Counterargument
In his 2001 biography of Bible translator William TyndaleWilliam Tyndale
William Tyndale was an English scholar and translator who became a leading figure in Protestant reformism towards the end of his life. He was influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus, who made the Greek New Testament available in Europe, and by Martin Luther...
, David Daniell, emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...
professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
, criticises Duffy's belief that an English bible would have come about sooner or later, within the framework of pre-Reformation Catholicism, and that Nicholas Love
Nicholas Love (monk)
Nicholas Love, also known as Nicholas Luff, was the first prior and fourth rector of the Carthusian house of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire . Love translated the "Meditationes Vitae Christi" Nicholas Love, also known as Nicholas Luff, (died c. 1424) was the first prior and fourth rector of the...
's translation of the The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is an adaptation/translation of Pseudo-Bonaventura's Meditationes Vitae Christi into English by Nicholas Love, OCart, the Carthusian prior of Mount Grace Priory, written ca...
largely satisfied lay needs for the New Testament. Daniell claims that Love's book actually contained little of Christ's teaching and a large amount of invented material not in the Gospels. Daniell argues that:
Catholic revisionist historians miss the point...The Church would never permit a complete printed New Testament in English from the Greek, because in that New Testament can be found neither the Seven Sacraments nor the doctrine of purgatory, two chief sources of the Church's power...An elementary working knowledge of the Bible, the ultimate root of the Christian faith, could only have been developed within Protestantism...[Catholic] piety and practice, in many ways admirable, we must reply, was imprisoned in a little world of recent Church tradition, while the vast continents of historic Bible revelation, towered over by the mountain range of Paul's theology, were forbidden territory...during the English Reformation, lay men and women were so hungry for the Bible in English that they were often prepared to die for it. Nobody was burned alive for The Little Hours of the VirginLittle Office of Our LadyThe Little Office of Our Lady also known as Hours of the Virgin is a liturgical devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in imitation of, and usually in addition to, the Divine Office in the Roman Catholic Church...
. There were nine printed editions of Love up to 1530, and none after, as Tyndale's New Testaments arrived.
When evaluating these claims and counterclaims one should keep in mind the extent to which parts of the Bible had been translated into English well before the 16th century, as well as the Biblical instruction conveyed through the religious theater that developed throughout the Middle Ages. Further, the popularity of the various forms of the Devotio Moderna
Devotio Moderna
Devotio Moderna, or Modern Devotion, was a 14th century new religious movement, with Gerard Groote as a key founder. Other well known members included Thomas à Kempis who was the likely author of the book The Imitation of Christ which proved to be highly influential for centuries.Groote's initial...
, which included the reading of Scripture, praying the Psalms, and such works as The Imitation of Christ in the years preceding the Reformation
Reformation
- Movements :* Protestant Reformation, an attempt by Martin Luther to reform the Roman Catholic Church that resulted in a schism, and grew into a wider movement...
, as well as the many sermons and homilies explicating sacred Scripture, delivered to the people through the Middle Ages (many of which are preserved to this day and so can make manifest the depth of Biblical teaching contained therein) indicate the extent to which the Bible's teaching reached the common person.