The Stripping of the Altars
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The Stripping of the Altars is a work of history written by Eamon Duffy and published in 1992 by Yale University Press.
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[edit] Summary of the book's argument, part 1
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 VIII.
The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the 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 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 — the list is enormous), Duffy demonstrates how every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with a deep and knowledgeable 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 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 vigorously contested by Duffy’s insistence 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 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 raising a number of salient points — 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 society had the capability of rebelling against unpopular 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 people could provide continued resistance to unpopular events.
[edit] Summary of the book's argument, part 2
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. As with the first part of the book, Duffy is exceptionally gifted at mining the wealth of written and visual evidence he has located. 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 the faithful, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of a population stripped of its 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 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.
[edit] Potential difficulties of the book
The Stripping of the Altars should not be considered an introduction to the Reformation. It assumes knowledge of the period’s historical framework, including its key moments and characters, edicts and laws and the alterations in theological orthodoxy it engendered. Readers new to the area are advised to get to grips with the basic chronology of the period before engaging with the book.
Two other aspects can make this book challenging for readers. Duffy has an intricate knowledge of Catholic liturgy and the rituals, beliefs and objects associated with it. The reader’s familiarity with function and appearance of objects such as the pyx or the monstrance or architectural elements such as the rood screen is taken for granted. A reader unfamiliar with these elements may miss out on their much broader symbolic significance. Additionally, there is no modernisation of the numerous quotations taken from sources in Middle English, making them more difficult to read through.
[edit] Duffy's own point of view
Through his knowledgeable description of its liturgy, Duffy occasionally betrays his love for the practices of the Catholic faith — for its music, its richness, its charity, its spiritual breadth. As a result, there is the occasional pejorative contrast with the implied cold austerity of Protestantism. Elsewhere, the moral failures of Protestants during the Reformation (the use of torture and murder, for example, on the Catholic population) receive the occasional severe criticism. Such condemnation, while understandable, stands out awkwardly in a book that usually refuses to make any judgements about the values and beliefs of the host of characters it studies.
But Duffy’s fondness for Catholic liturgy also give the book its warmth, and also augments his ability to make the reader empathise with the spiritual concerns, sometimes significant, sometimes trivial, of the sixteenth-century churchgoer. The last few pages of the book are particularly moving, as Duffy salutes the passing of centuries of pious religious practice, and the melancholy realisation of how quickly the new religion has replaced the old.
Duffy’s preferences should not cloud his reputation as an impartial historian. The Stripping of the Altars scrupulously amasses a huge bank of evidence. The evidence is deployed slowly and carefully, but effectively. Tiny fragments of information are artfully patched together to form huge mosaic of English society. Duffy is very much an old-school historian. There is no use of philosophical or sociological theories to promote his argument; rather there is the steady accumulation of facts that allow for the establishment of an almost incontestable argument.
