Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400- 1580 (Eamon                                       Duffy, 1992)

Eamon Duffy's book is a revisionist account of the English Reformation. One traditional narrative of the English Reformation is that proto-Protestant impulses and demands for the reform of a corrupt, decaying Catholic Church existed in English society well before Henry VIII made his official break. This strain of scholarship presents the Reformation that occurred as inevitable and natural. Duffy disputes this argument by asserting that in reality, Catholic Christianity was flourishing in early modern England, and that “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 the Reformation” (p. 4). As a result, the measures taken by the crown to carry out their Reformation were an abrupt, unpopular break, not a natural evolution. Duffy notes that the traditional English Reformation narrative has led to looking at late Medieval religion as merely a stage set for the Reformation and not for its own intrinsic qualities, thus greatly distorting the picture scholars have formed. One of Duffy's purposes is to rectify this situation, and he devotes the first half of his book to investigating the “structures of traditional religion.” The second half of the book analyzes “the stripping of the altars,” or the disruption of traditional belief that Reformation measures caused.

One major, influential study that has looked at late Medieval Catholicism in its own right and not merely as a precursor to the English Reformation is Keith Thomas's 1971 book, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. This book serves as a background to Duffy's own analysis. Thomas' book argues that the Medieval Church in England retained many of the “magical,” unorthodox beliefs of pre-Christian native animist religions, in which spells, amulets, and sacred places, if invoked, could automatically protect someone from misfortune. Duffy doesn't altogether deny that such practices existed, but he adds to the picture by arguing for the central importance of the liturgy and catechism, through which an essential Catholic orthodoxy was maintained. He argues that in early modern England, “the liturgy was in fact the principle reservoir from which the religious paradigms and beliefs of the people were drawn” (p. 2). He finds evidence of this in the widespread use of the liturgical calendar to regulate the lives of all members of society. Duffy writes that the “integration of personal devotional gestures into the seasonal pattern of the liturgy was a universal feature of late medieval religion” (p. 40). This time also saw the printing and dissemination of “lay folks' catechisms,” which along with increased literacy, Duffy argues, helped nourish widespread and essentially orthodox devotion.

After establishing his view of late medieval Christianity, Duffy then analyzes the effects the reforms instituted by the government had on these traditional religious practices. He characterizes the English Reformation as amounting to an “attack on traditional religion.” This began under Henry VIII, but in the end Henry was a moderating force, and his death in January 1547 “freed the reforming party from the restraint of a king who, for all his cynicism and hatred of the papacy, remained attached to much of the traditional framework of Catholicism,” especially the mass (p. 448). Protestant reforms accelerated under Edward VI, who was a child king surrounded by a Protestant council. One example Duffy gives of how these reforms affected everyday people is his investigation of the abolition of altars and images from parish churches. In this case he makes excellent and extensive use of the material record preserved in churches, something he does very effectively throughout the book. He notes how many altars and images were removed, only to be safely kept and restored to their places in the Catholic revival under Queen Mary. Duffy takes this as evidence for the continuity of Catholic belief and popular opposition to many Reformation measures. Another example he cites of the destructive disruption of the Protestant reforms under Edward VI is the effect of the official royal 1549 Prayer Book. This book represented a “radical discontinuity” which among other changes nearly dismantled the traditional liturgical calendar. According to Duffy, this new book inspired a popular revolt in the the West Country. He writes that “the rebels recognized that the prayer-book was merely one element in a program which affected their religious life at every level, the dissolution of the elaborate symbolic framework within which the life of their communities has been shaped for generations” (p. 467). This event is representative of one aspect of Duffy's larger thesis – that the English Reformation was an unpopular disruption of a flourishing early modern Catholic culture, not the inevitable fulfillment of a popular wish to break with a decaying, corrupt church, as other scholars have asserted.