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

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Whatever the Protestant movement was elsewhere, in England, at least, it was largely imposed from the top. A] vigorous and eloquent book, a work of daring revision and a masterpiece of the historical imagination. On Maundy Thursday, after the Mass of the Last Supper and procession with the Host to the Altar of Repose, the other altars in the church were ritually stripped of their altar cloths and ornaments in preparation for the stark liturgy of Good Friday, while the ministers and choir recited Psalm 21, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

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

He is what lifts us out of our mundane sinful lives, and conducts our attention to what is changeless, pure, and in every sense, higher. The Candlemas ceremonies were designed to summon up the scenes they commemorated, and the quest for the visionary vividness which made Margery unsteady on her feet lay behind the tendency in late medieval England to elaborate and make more explicit the representational and dramatic dimension of the liturgy. If this interpretation is correct and if Anglican history needs re-examination, then, Eamon Duffy's book has important ramifications in the area of ecumenism. Today, the founding and management of the Academy of Geneva serves as a valuable example for a deeper understanding of Christian higher education.Duffy's narrative demonstrates how centuries of religious practice evaporated in the face of fierce centralist control. He is the author of Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes and The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, both available in paperback from Yale University Press. Prior to the 1980s, academic consensus seemed to be that the English Reformation was a response to an immoral clergy and an ineffective institutional Church. The people took blessed candles away from the ceremony, to be lit during thunderstorms or in times of sickness, and to be placed in the hands of the dying.

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

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.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”. Providing opportunities for intellectual exchange among scholars of the period, the Society also actively encourages the integration of younger colleagues into the academic community.