Content area
Full Text
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992, xii + 654 pp., ISBN 0-300-05342-8, £29.95.
By a curious twist of intellectual history, the received account of medieval England has recently been challenged by various scholars from one university. It was from Cambridge that David Knowles showed just how far the history of the religious Orders of medieval England had been neglected and distorted, while Walter Ullmann gave the medieval papacy and its law a stable place in historical studies. Now a new generation of Cambridge historians, also all Catholics, is energetically championing revisionist accounts of the late medieval period in England: Brendan Bradshaw, Richard Rex and the author being reviewed here, Eamon Duffy.
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 combine with the publications of J.J Scarisbrick and Christopher Haigh to contribute to an eventual shift in popular opinion and attitudes concerning the Reformation.
In essence, this voluminous work asks two short questions concerning the period 1400 to 1580: were the English strongly attached to Catholicism? And, did they support the Reformation readily? The answer to the first question is 'yes', to the second it is 'no'.
The first part of the work is an exploration of medieval English Catholicism, and its focus is on the parish. In a typically robust phrase, Duffy remarks that if we can take it as an axiom of human nature that where one's money is one's heart is also, then the hearts of the late medieval and early Tudor English were in their parish churches. He has chosen to map out the riches of medieval Catholicism around four clusters: (a) liturgy, learning and the laity (b) encountering the holy (c) prayers and spells (d) now and at the hour of our death. Rather than attempt...