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

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Unlike Schwarz, however, Ronald Hutton and W. Brown Patterson found Duffy's narrative of the Reformation unconvincing. Ronald Hutton criticised Duffy's neglect of unpublished sources and his 'selective blindness in his treatment of colleagues and sources'. [10] Candlemas, the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary or, alternatively, of the Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple, was celebrated forty days after Christmas, on 2 February, and constituted the last great festival of the Christmas cycle. The texts prescribed for the feast in breviary and missal emphasize the Christmas paradoxes of the strength of the eternal God displayed in the fragility of the new-born child, of the appearance of the divine light in the darkness of human sin, of renewal and rebirth in the dead time of the year, and of the new life of Heaven manifested to Simeon’s, and the world’s, old age. [1] Celebrated as a “Greater Double” – that is, of lesser solemnity only than the supreme feasts such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but of equal status to Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, and All Saints – its importance in the popular mind is reflected in the fact that it was one of the days on which, according to the legend of St Brendan, Judas was allowed out of Hell to ease his torment in the sea.[2] The Purification was marked by one of the most elaborate processions of the liturgical year, when every parishioner was obliged to join in, carrying a blessed candle, which was offered, together with a penny, to the priest at Mass. The candles so offered were part of the laity’s parochial dues, and were probably often burned before the principal image of the Virgin in the church.[3] An account survives from fourteenth-century Friesthorpe in Lincolnshire of a row between the rector and his parish because on the day after Candlemas “maliciously and against the will of the parishioners” he took down and carried off all the candles which the previous day had been set before the Image of the Blessed Virgin, “for devotion and penance”.[4] The blessing of candles and procession took place immediately before the parish Mass, and, in addition to the candles offered to the priest, many others were blessed, including the great Paschal candle used in the ceremonies for the blessing of the baptismal water at Easter and Pentecost. The people then processed round the church carrying lighted candles, and the “Nunc Dimittis” was sung. Mass began immediately afterwards with the singing of verses from Psalm 47, “We have received your mercy, O God, in the midst of your temple.”[5] Iconoclasm and greed destroyed the saints and paintings, the banners and vestments, the gold chalices and patens and pyxes, and disbanded the lay associations that had kept it all running. The reformers were seldom happy because their swingeing reforms never went far enough for them. They simply could not understand why people would hide statues of saints in their attics and baptismal fonts in their fields. Eamon Duffyis a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the author of The Voices of Morebath, Fires of Faith, Marking the Hours, Saints and Sinners,and Ten Popes Who Shook the World.

The Stripping of the Altars - Google Books The Stripping of the Altars - Google Books

Historical scholarship, like any other field of knowledge, never stands still. No take on the past is ever definitive, no historian either has or ought to have the last word: truth, that elusive thing, is the daughter of time. The best any of us can hope for is to have provoked others to disagree productively. The Stripping of the Altars has been providing disagreement, and some qualified assent, for 30 years. It is my hope that it may prove to have something to contribute to the conversation and debate for at least a little longer. The official blog of Yale University Press London. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else... I'm not Christian and not British (or Irish), so I couldn't have less of a stake in the polemical parts of this book. But for some reason I still found it to be a fascinating and compelling read. The first half of the book in particular is quite beautiful in its depiction of the lay world of late medieval Christianity, with its "lush affective piety" and "charming" folk practices. Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic. The magazine is now reaching many UK parishes and its globals subscription base continues to rise.David Siegenthaler, writing in the Anglican Theological Review said, "The importance of this book is that it affords opportunity to look broadly and comprehensively at the religious life of women and men before and after the separation from the Roman obedience and so take the measure of that life that in the continuum of English church history it can be noted and honored." This book will afford enjoyment and enlightenment to layman and specialist alike.”—Peter Heath, Times Literary Supplement Hutton, Ronald (1993). "Review of The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England 1400—1580". The Journal of Theological Studies. 44 (2): 762–764. doi: 10.1093/jts/44.2.762. ISSN 0022-5185. JSTOR 23966411. Then along came the English Reformation and, in less than thirty years, swept it all away: the saints, the altars, the banners, replacing them with... The Word. Unadorned English words, a communion table, a Bible.

‘The Stripping of the Altars’, 30 years on - Catholic Herald

Duffy divides his work into two parts. The first and most extensive is a portrait of popular spirituality on the eve of the Protestant Reformation. He describes a robust parish life in late Medieval England, hardly the spiritual doldrums that Protestants claimed it to be. Late Medieval Catholicism “exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation” (p. 4) He shows this through many aspects of parish life. First, laypeople integrated seasonal liturgy with personal devotional gestures such as feasting, processions, and other forms of celebration—most notably, during Candlemas and Holy Week. “For townsmen and countrymen alike,” says Duffy, “the rhythms of the liturgy on the eve of the Reformation remained the rhythms of life itself” (p. 52). Second, laypeople invested themselves in catechesis: they funded and produced wall paintings and church furnishings, and they read liturgical and devotional books that circulated widely with the rise of print and literacy. These are among the means by which “the ploughman learned his paternoster.” Third, they celebrated the Mass—not merely as passive recipients, but actively, through sponsorship of special masses and imitating Mass liturgy in private devotions. Fourth, the laity devoted themselves to the saints. They celebrated saints’ days around the calendar, read hagiography, and infused their work and commerce with devotion to saints. Finally, their concern about death underlay an elaborate cult of intercession for the dead, including provision of Masses, alms, pilgrimage, and the adornment of churches and images. This mammoth of a book is often labeled as a “revisionist” history, which is a meaningless shorthand unless one knows the subject under revision. That subject is the notion that, on the eve of the English Reformation, Catholicism was a spent force, a hodgepodge of superstition and clerical corruption. In this view, Reformation could not come fast enough to this world of incomprehensible prayers in a language unknown to the vast majority of the people; of idolatrous worship and veneration of images; of a venal trade in indulgences; of a separation between clerical and lay pieties, between devotions affordable for the rich and merely accessible for the poor. Duffy dismantles this view. For him, late medieval Catholicism in England was a vibrant, coherent set of communal beliefs and practices, largely shared by the elites and the common folk alike.Duffy's account of rumours of Henry's return to traditional religion following fall of AB/fear felt by Protestants only serves to indicate how, for Henry, the new reformist doctrines/acts were indelibly tied to his personal needs (succession etc) rather than true belief. Especially when it came to death. How to die properly was perhaps the main preoccupation of late medieval piety -- as, of course, it had to be when one considers how much depended on it. At a minimum, one had to die in communion, but for any "even cristen" that was only the beginning. Those spared eternal damnation still had to endure the pains of Purgatory, and to do so for unknown lengths of time. Still, the ordeal could be shortened, if not altogether bypassed, through the intercession of the Virgin, the saints or the diligent prayers of the survivors. Winning that intercession was the goal of the ars moriendi, or the doctrine of proper death, and it was an endeavor that claimed the energies, the thoughts and the resources of countless men and women, no matter their rank, wealth or education. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-05-13 20:29:47 Bookplateleaf 0008 Boxid IA1114918 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New Haven Donor Hugely, hugely detailed book that does a very nice job of critiquing what had been the prevailing viewpoint of the English Reformation: that medieval Catholicism had petered out, with disinterested clerics and semi-pagan peasants only revitalized by the influence of Protestant reform. It's an inaccurate way of looking at things (or at best oversimplified), and Duffy does a really nice job lining up piece after piece of evidence that suggests that medieval Catholicism wasn't worn out or despised by most Englishmen, but rather it was an integral part of their lives, both as individuals and as a community.

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

The myth of neutral history is just that: a myth. If it actually existed, no one would want to read it. Every historian brings to their subject-matter a raft of experience, opinions, attitudes and assumptions that inform their perceptions, and influence both the issues they find interesting, and the questions they bring to their material. History is an attempt to discern the patterns that underlie the surviving traces of the past, not a bloodless chronicle of patternless events, and the interpretation of the records of the past demands personal gifts like imagination and empathy. 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. Under Henry VIII (r.1509-1547), though the parishes were commanded to destroy sacred images being “worshiped,” some were very slow in heeding these commands. When the time came to get rid of them, they would “sell” images and statues to parishioners who protected them from the destructive tendencies of royally reformed authorities. In the very brief period of Catholic restoration under Queen Mary (1563-1568), altar stones, holy images, statues, vestments, candles, Masses for the dead, and Latin suddenly reappeared in churches after having been outlawed for years. If Henry VIII’s officials did not want the physical remains of Catholicism to survive, it seems that a fair number of the laity did. urn:lcp:strippingofalta00duff:epub:fa802e44-e770-4141-846b-53d8b82a023d Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier strippingofalta00duff Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6nz98r8f Isbn 9780300108286

So compelling, so rich is this account, it has the effect of enlisting one as a fervent partisan of the world in which these practices flourished. In that world, Duffy argues, both the upper classes and the simpler folk believed in the same things, they participated in the same communal rites, they drew on -- regardless of their literacy -- the same religious literature, and they expressed their piety in similar ways. As their wills attest, their means might have been different, but the concerns were often very much alike. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Openlibrary OL20928980M Openlibrary_edition Duffy emphasises regional differences with regard to implementing and enforcing reform - lee vs shaxton (injunctions) note 3) See Duffy’s devotional writings, The Creed in the Catechism: The Life of God for Us (Burns and Oates, 2005), Faith of Our Fathers (Continuum, 2006), and Walking to Emmaus (Burns & Oates, 2006); and his popular history of the Popes, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; 3rd ed. 2006).

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England

A mighty and momentous book: a book to be read and re-read, pondered and revered; a subtle, profound book written with passion and eloquence, and with masterly control.’One can feel some sympathy for the Lollards who rejected the over the top adoration of the eucharist in that period (not to mention the Jews who were treated as hardly human by their Christian neighbors), while at the same time appreciating how the traditional faith and the liturgical cycle at its core could give and express meaning and a sense of belonging and purpose for many people. This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people’s experience of religion, showing that late-medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but a strong and vigorous tradition. For this edition, Duffy has written a new introduction reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period.