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

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note 2) Duffy develops this perspective in his most recent work, a full-length treatment of Mary published just this week: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

The Stripping of the Altars’ Candlemas: An Extract from ‘The Stripping of the Altars’

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-c.1580 Yale University Press, 2005, Preface, p. xvi ISBN 9780300108286 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]Then, I began to explore the churches of East Anglia, and had it borne in on me that huge numbers of them had undergone extensive and costly extensions, rebuilding and refurbishment in the 15th and early 16th century, and that this remarkable surge of activity was funded largely by lay donations and bequests, a massive popular investment in the practice and beliefs of late-medieval Catholicism that had left its trace not only in a vast archive of late-medieval wills, but in the funeral brasses, carved fonts, rood screens and wall-paintings, stained glass, and family and guild chapels, which survived in such astonishing abundance in East Anglia. How could all this be squared with conventional notions of a failing church which had forfeited the confidence of the laity? Of course, rationally I can understand the reformers' urge to get rid of the thousand years of superstitious accretion around the Bible, though I wonder if they realised just how radical and revolutionary the newly available New Testament was.

Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church

Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal Ombres OP, Robert. "Review of 'The Stripping of the Altars', by Eamon Duffy". Moreana Angers. Vol. 30, Iss. 113, (Mar 1993): 97-102 Certainly a classic work in looking at the The Reformation in England. The author tries to build a case to show that the late medieval Church was popular, woven into the fabric of people's lives and its devotions showed regard for the weak and the poor. The Church was engaging well with the rise of printing, new religious literature appearing. The Reformation is presented as an ongoing process starting with Henry VIII, but becoming more strident under the reign of Edward IV , then triumphing under the reign of Elizabeth. The brief return to Catholicism under the reign of Mary 1553-1555 is shown as being a move which certainly appealed to many English people. In other words The Reformation is cast as a move that was essentially unpopular and imposed from above, not as a welcome relief from a decadent and corrupt church. Perhaps it takes an Irishman to offer Englishmen (and others) a convincing picture of the religion of the ordinary lay people of England in the age before the Reformation. ...The evocation of [medieval Roman Catholicism,] that older, pre-Reformation tradition and of what its observances meant to the laity of its time is the theme of the first part of Dr. Duffy's deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated study. [7] Margery’s response was characteristically extreme, but in essence her expectation of the liturgy was very much that of her neighbours, and there is no reason to think that the “hevynly songys” were anything other than the liturgical chants for the day, sung with all the splendour and resources which a great urban church like St Margaret’s, Lynn, could command. 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.

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Upon its publication, the book was hailed by many as original and persuasive account of English Catholicism in the Late Middle Ages. Writing in the New York Review of Books, British historian Maurice Keen stated, Duffy [marshals] an impressive array of the latest local research . . . [and] demands of this body of information an interpretation which is sensible and balanced. . . . Duffy has produced a masterpiece of historical investigation and evaluation and this book must be read by any serious student of the English Reformation."—John Vidmar, o.p., The Thomist It is more than mnemonic; the Last Supper itself is not merely “remembered” in the liturgical events of the Triduum, or in the repetitions of the daily Mass. As the Catholic Church has continued to teach, the Real Presence transcends the historical event. Yet the historical event remains true within it. These things really happened; and by their nature continue to happen in a world that was altered by the coming of Our Savior. The official blog of Yale University Press London. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else...