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

Product Information

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 Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated."—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books For a historian increasingly preoccupied with the nature of the Reformation, all this had a special resonance. I didn’t of course imagine that the ritual revolutions of the 16th and the 20th centuries could be equated, but some of the issues were undoubtedly the same. The calls for the drastic simplification of worship as a good in its own right, the disparagement of the apparently magical mindset which underlay the ritual framework of pre-conciliar Catholicism, the abolition of “rote” practices like Friday abstinence in favour of voluntary and private acts of penance, which were held to be superior because more “authentic” – these were in some respects a re-run of the reforming agenda of the 16th century, and were often justified with strikingly similar arguments.

The Stripping of the Altars - The Catholic Thing The Stripping of the Altars - The Catholic Thing

Duffy also highlights a few issues affected by the Reformation which I had not given much thought to. One is how guilds and the abundance of different masses and cults for saints gave lay people a degree of control over their religion. Another is how the traditional and reformed religions viewed death and the dead. Of course indulgences are famously controversial and Duffy treats those with criticism for their excess, while rejecting the view of traditional Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages as a "religion of the living in service of the dead." But more novel (to me) is Duffy's description of how traditional practices such as the bede roll and funeral services, as well as the concepts of purgatory and indulgences, led to a view of human community made up of the dead and living together, bound by ties of kinship or otherwise and responsibilities to act for each other that did not end simply because one person was dead and another was living. Some of the most moving passages in the book describe how inscribed bronze plates from graves were sold off by the hundredweight during the Edwardine spoliation: a concrete expression of the reforming theological changes that severed the tie between living and dead, and the idea that the living could do anything or bear any obligation for the souls of those who had died.

At the library

Nevertheless, it is the liturgical celebration which shaped and defined such gild observances, and the same centrality of the pattern of the liturgy is evident in a number of the surviving Corpus Christi plays of the Purification. In the East Anglian Ludus Coventriae play of the Purification, for example, Simeon receives the child Jesus with a speech which is simply a literal verse rendering of the opening psalm of the Mass of the feast. While he holds the child in his arms, a choir sings “Nunc Dimittis”, almost certainly to the Candlemas processional music. Joseph distributes candles to Mary, Simeon, and Anna, and takes one himself. Having thus formed, in the words of the Speculum, a “worshipful processioun”, they go together to the altar, where Mary lays the child, and Joseph offers the temple priest five pence. For the audience, the whole play would have been inescapably redolent of the familiar Candlemas liturgy, and in essence an extension of it.[21] Another interesting point is that there were no mass persecutions to death. There were high profile victims such as Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, but it was not until Mary I revived the statute De Haeretico Comburendo that hundreds of people went to the flames for their religious beliefs. This, of course, was recorded in detail in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It is hardly mentioned in Duffy. We hear a great deal about the attempts by Bishop Bonner and Cardinal Pole to reimpose Catholic orthodoxy. It would be interesting for their to have been some discussion of why they thought that the Fires of Smithfield, in Bonner’s own diocese, assisted with this process. Nor is there any discussion about how, when the Protestants returned from exile in Frankfurt and Geneva in the reign of Elizabeth I, that these fires coloured their actions when, in turn, they reimposed Protestant orthodoxy on the Church of England. Ombres OP, Robert. "Review of 'The Stripping of the Altars', by Eamon Duffy". Moreana Angers. Vol. 30, Iss. 113, (Mar 1993): 97-102 In terms of material evidence, this simply wasn't the case. While the Church had plenty of flaws, especially higher in its hierarchy, on the local level it was very active and responsive to the needs of varying communities. Most people attended services with enthusiasm; even if they were not markedly pious, it was the main entertainment available, and priests and architects tried hard to make the experience of church attendance attractive and interesting. Even if congregants were not entirely happy with a particular pastor there is rarely evidence that they were dissatisfied with Catholicism per se. In fact, there is a mass of evidence in the form of wills* that English people had strong views on certain doctrines such as charity, prayer, and Purgatory.

The Stripping of the Altars - Wikipedia

The Stripping of the Altar or the Stripping of the Chancel is a ceremony carried out in many Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican churches on Maundy Thursday. [2]

Develop

It would probably also had helped to make the points more clear. As it is they get lost and seems particularly vague. the author describes things a lot and you just keep wondering where its leading, why it's relevant, will there be a point?

The Stripping of the Altars - Yale University Press London

Kollar, Rene. "Review of 'The Stripping of the Altars', by Eamon Duffy". The Catholic Historical Review Washington. Vol. 82, Iss. 1, (Jan 1996): 93 The official blog of Yale University Press London. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else...This book] at last gives the culture of the late Middle Ages in England its due, and helps us to see the period as it was and not as Protestant reformers and their intellectual descendants imagined it to be. . . . A monumental and deeply felt work."—Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement Others expressed a more ambivalent attitude. Writing in the London Review of Books, Susan Brigden praised the first part of the book as a "splendid achievement" despite occasional instances of "special pleading" in favor of late medieval Catholicism. [9] Regarding the second half of the book covering the Reformation, however, Brigden was more critical: "with the advance of reform Duffy is hardly concerned. The power and, for many, the truth of the central doctrines of Protestantism are never admitted; nor are the spiritual doubts that assailed many Catholics." [9] 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. His argument seems to undermine the credibility of wills as stand-alone evidence for personal faith, yet he goes on to do exactly this? They should surely be used in conjunction with additional evidence from parish records (donations/guilds/conformity to previous injunctions etc etc)

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

Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.’ In The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy recreates lay people’s experience of religion in the pre-Reformation church, showing that late-medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but a strong and vigorous tradition.

She then leads the company in a dance. This and the final dance of virgins to the accompaniment of minstrels, with which the play concludes, takes it beyond the scope of liturgy, but not perhaps worlds away from para-liturgical observances like those of the Beverley Candlemas Gild, which, the gild certificate states, were to conclude “cum gaudio”. What is beyond argument, however, is that the spectrum of Candlemas observances evident in these sources testifies to a profound and widespread lay assimilation and deployment of the imagery, actions, and significance of the liturgy of the feast. And the introduction of a “folk” element into the Digby play, in the form of dances “in the worshipe of Iesu, our lady, and seynt Anne”, serves to warn us against underestimating the links between liturgical observance and the “secular” celebratory and ludic dimensions of lay culture at the end of the Middle Ages.[24] 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).