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

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Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated. . . . Duffy's analysis . . . carries conviction."--Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books If he [the priest] [should] say duly the words over the bread that our Lord Jesus Christ said when he made his Maundy among his disciples [while] he sat at supper, I believe that it is his very flesh and blood and not material bread; and never may [these words] be unsaid, be [they] once said.” (110, my adaptation)

Stripping of the Altar - Wikipedia Stripping of the Altar - Wikipedia

Duffy's book is in every sense a substantial achievement. It is lengthy, carefully argued and researched, and illustrated with photographs of direct relevance to the argument. The tone is vigorous and alert, with occasional lyrical passages, and the author writes with clear sympathy and imaginative understanding about the disappearing world of medieval Catholicism. The book will mark a turning point in how several aspects of the English Reformation are considered by historians and the educated public. It will . . . contribute to an eventual shift in popular opinion and attitudes concerning the Reformation."—Robert Ombres, Moreana a b Vidmar, John. "Review of 'The Stripping of the Altars', by Eamon Duffy". The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review vol. 58 no. 2, 1994, p. 357-359. Project MUSE In terms of material evidence, this simply wasn't the case. While the Church had plenty of flaws, especially higher in its hierarchy, on the local level it was very active and responsive to the needs of varying communities. Most people attended services with enthusiasm; even if they were not markedly pious, it was the main entertainment available, and priests and architects tried hard to make the experience of church attendance attractive and interesting. Even if congregants were not entirely happy with a particular pastor there is rarely evidence that they were dissatisfied with Catholicism per se. In fact, there is a mass of evidence in the form of wills* that English people had strong views on certain doctrines such as charity, prayer, and Purgatory. In this extract, Duffy explores the feast of Candlemas, the festival commemorating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple.Nevertheless, it is the liturgical celebration which shaped and defined such gild observances, and the same centrality of the pattern of the liturgy is evident in a number of the surviving Corpus Christi plays of the Purification. In the East Anglian Ludus Coventriae play of the Purification, for example, Simeon receives the child Jesus with a speech which is simply a literal verse rendering of the opening psalm of the Mass of the feast. While he holds the child in his arms, a choir sings “Nunc Dimittis”, almost certainly to the Candlemas processional music. Joseph distributes candles to Mary, Simeon, and Anna, and takes one himself. Having thus formed, in the words of the Speculum, a “worshipful processioun”, they go together to the altar, where Mary lays the child, and Joseph offers the temple priest five pence. For the audience, the whole play would have been inescapably redolent of the familiar Candlemas liturgy, and in essence an extension of it.[21]

Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church

Of course, 90% of it had no foundation at all in the Bible, and some of the saints had started as pagan gods and goddesses. Famously there were enough relics of Splinters of the True Cross in Medieval Europe to build a fleet of ships.She then leads the company in a dance. This and the final dance of virgins to the accompaniment of minstrels, with which the play concludes, takes it beyond the scope of liturgy, but not perhaps worlds away from para-liturgical observances like those of the Beverley Candlemas Gild, which, the gild certificate states, were to conclude “cum gaudio”. What is beyond argument, however, is that the spectrum of Candlemas observances evident in these sources testifies to a profound and widespread lay assimilation and deployment of the imagery, actions, and significance of the liturgy of the feast. And the introduction of a “folk” element into the Digby play, in the form of dances “in the worshipe of Iesu, our lady, and seynt Anne”, serves to warn us against underestimating the links between liturgical observance and the “secular” celebratory and ludic dimensions of lay culture at the end of the Middle Ages.[24] Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work."—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal As literacy increased with the beginning of the 16th century, innumerable manuscript and later printed primers helped people to navigate the sacred, with their Paternosters (Our Father), Aves (Hail Mary), Credos (Creed) and Offices and their saints' stories. The rubrics explained exactly how many days or years you, or the dead person you were praying for, would be let off from Purgatory if you prayed the Fifteen Oes or the Little Office of the Virgin. But you didn't have to be able to read to understand it all because everything was actually designed to make the stories accessible to the illiterate. The official blog of Yale University Press London. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else...