The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. By Eamon Duffy. Yale University Press; 2nd edition, 2005.
Eamon Duffy is a well-respected historian whose primary field of focus is British history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. His major contribution to historiography is his revision of the prevailing view that English Catholicism was a decaying force that maintained precious little support in the broader English community when King Henry VIII broke with Rome and started the Protestant Church of England. Duffy argues that this popular perception is quite far from the truth, and in fact Catholicism and its attendant traditions and practices were quite popular in England and formed an integral part of everyday life.
Revisionist history is inherently controversial, and Duffy’s work has received a wide range of responses, ranging from staunch supporters of the prevailing historiography who viewed Duffy’s perspectives as little more than wishful thinking. In contrast, others, particularly Catholics, have responded warmly to Duffy’s scholarship, viewing it as a means of reclaiming a past that has long been distorted by false perceptions and slanted views.
In his introduction, Duffy criticizes the oft-stated assumption that English Catholicism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was primarily the obsession of the Church and the upper classes, and that the common people had little interest in this religion. In this view, when Henry VIII imposed a new religious regime, the populace switched faiths without any compunction, and possibly even without much interest. Duffy asserts that the complete opposite was the case.
“It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other. I do not believe that it is helpful or accurate to talk of the religion of the average fifteenth-century parishioner as magical, superstitious, or semi-pagan. Nor does it seem to me that the most interesting aspect of late medieval religion lay in the views and activities of those who, like the relatively small number of Lollards, rejected its central tenets and preoccupations…It is true that the wealthy and literate had increasing access to and interest in types of spirituality previously confined to the monastery. Yet within the diversity of medieval religious options there was a remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum, a shared repertoire of symbols, prayers, and beliefs which crossed and bridge even the gulf between the literate and the illiterate.” (2-3).
Duffy’s book is divided into two parts. In the first, he describes religious life in England during his time, and argues that every aspect of the average Englishman’s life was permeated with religious teaching and practice. Duffy studies the Mass, educational primers, belief in Purgatory, the lives of the Saints, religious business influences, and how the average person dealt with superstition and other folk beliefs that were opposed by the Catholic Church. Duffy stresses that Catholicism was not some easily detachable and discarded trait, but instead was an essential part of the nation’s worldview. Duffy illustrates just how deeply Catholic practices influenced people’s lives, such as in his study of the liturgy, where he describes how attending religious services helped people cope with all aspects of existence.
“Any study of late medieval religion must begin with the liturgy, for within that great seasonal cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture, lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it. Within the liturgy birth, copulation, and death, journeying and homecoming, guilt and forgiveness, the blessing of homely things and the call to pass beyond them were all located, tested, and sanctioned. In the liturgy and in the sacramental celebrations which were its central moments, medieval people found the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives.” (11).
The second half of the book is devoted to explaining how Henry VIII, his descendants, and his government changed England’s religion from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Though Henry VIII initially saw his Church of England as exactly the same as the Roman Catholic Church, only without the Pope, others adopted new theological viewpoints. The title of this book refers to the fact that the artwork and valuable treasures of the churches and chapels were all taken from their original homes and taken to enrich the nobility. Indeed, the common people of England were largely impoverished as the Church’s property was taken away and its charitable activities were destroyed, and the rich nobles who promoted Protestantism seized hold of the wealth and kept it for themselves.
Duffy illustrates that the average Englishman suffered in the midst of these upheavals. The people of England obeyed their monarch because to go against their ruler, and therefore their country, was thought to be unthinkable. Yet the actions of a determined elite minority transformed the nation from the top down, and the people had no choice but to follow them, even if it meant the death of their culture and in many ways, the destruction of a part of themselves.
“But the price for such accommodation, of course, was the death of the past it sought to conserve. If Protestantism was transformed, so was traditional religion. The imaginative world of the Golden Legion and the Festial was gradually obliterated from wall and window and bracket, from primer and block-print and sermon, and was replaced by that of the Old Testament. Cranmer’s somberly magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemnand their most vulnerable moments. And more astringent and strident words entered their hearts and minds too, the polemic of the Homilies, of Jewel’s Apology, of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and of a thousand “no-popery” sermons, a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years. By the end of the 1570’s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had the known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.” (593).
The story of England at this time is a tale of how a nation’s people lost their faith by force and had another foisted upon them. A government managed to completely change the entire country’s culture by replacing the most essential aspect of that culture: its religion. Other historians have approached this subject with a great deal more anger and resentment, but there is no rage in Duffy’s book, only a very deep and profound sadness. In well over six hundred pages of text, Duffy creates a picture of a beautiful and complex world, one that was unceremoniously destroyed. It is therefore understandable why many Anglicans might find this book offensive: Duffy’s book presents the story of the imposition of Protestantism in England as a heartbreaking tragedy.
–Chris Chan
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