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The Stripping of the Altars : Traditional Religion in England (1992)

Intercollegiate Studies Institute Fifty BEST Books of the Century

[L]ate 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 Reformation. Traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay, and indeed in a whole host of ways, from the multiplication of vernacular religious books to adaptations within the national and regional cult of the saints, was showing itself well able to meet needs and new conditions. Nor does it seem to me that tendencies towards the "privatizing" of religion, or growing lay religious sophistication and literacy, or growing lay activism and power in gild and parish, had in them the drive towards Protestantism which some historians have discerned. That there was much in late medieval religion which was later developed within a reformed setting is obvious, but there was virtually nothing in the character of religion in late medieval England which could only or even best have been developed within Protestantism. The religion of Elizabethan England was of course full of continuities with and developments of what had gone before. Even after the iconoclastic hammers and scraping-tools of conviction Protestantism had done their worst, enough of the old imagery and old resonances remained in the churches in which the new religion was preached to complicate, even, in the eyes of some, to compromise, the new teachings. [...] Yet when all is said and done, the Reformation was a violent disruption, not the natural fulfillment, of most of what was vigorous in later medieval piety and religious practice.

That contention, if true, obviously raises a series of major problems for the historian of the Reformation. If medieval religion was decadent, unpopular, or exhausted, the success of the Reformation hardly requires explanation. If, on the contrary, it was vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular, then we have much yet to discover about the processes and the pace of reform.
-Stripping of the Altars

It is the very great achievement of Mr. Duffy here that, by reference to a vast array of primary sources, he pretty conclusively proves that late medieval Catholicism in Britain was indeed vibrant and vital and that it ultimately took actions from above--in the form of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I--to break it, that there was no particular pressure from below for the Church to Reform. Equally remarkable is that he succeeds in this task while avoiding the dryness that too often overwhelms authors who try to prove their case by relying on original sources. That he manages to keep the story moving even as he has us studying ancient wills is very impressive.

To a certain extent, the book can be read as a prolonged refutation of "the Whig interpretation of history". It would, I think, be hard after reading Mr. Duffy's work for anyone to argue that the English Reformation was inevitable nor that it was the sole means by which the cause of human freedom could progress. But I wonder if when he says that there "was virtually nothing in the character of religion in late medieval England which could only or even best have been developed within Protestantism" he's not missing the point. Perhaps the fact that protestantism, democracy, and capitalism--which we might profitably consider to be nothing more than the extension of freedom to the religious, political, and economic spheres--all found their unique fulfillment in Britain (and its colonies), should lead us in a somewhat different direction. Perhaps the Reformation truly had little to do with any spiritual or institutional sclerosis in the Catholic Church, but was more a function of a yet unexplained, and probably unexplainable, culture-wide impulse towards freedom.

After all, it can hardly be a coincidence that in the space of just a few centuries Britain produced an unparalleled series of milestones on the path toward modern liberal capitalist democracy, stretching from the Magna Carta to the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence to the U.S. Constitution, from the English Revolution to the American Revolution from Hobbes's Leviathan to Locke's Treatises on Government to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to the Federalist Papers. Some massive force was at work here, but why here and why only here seems beyond our ken. Likewise, it seems impossible for us to determine what came first, the protestantism or the democracy or the capitalism; impossible for us to unravel how they fed off of each other; impossible for us to know to what degree the various forms of destruction they left in their wake--of the Catholic Church; of the British monarchy and aristocracy; of agrarian society; etc.--were useful, maybe even necessary.

What Mr. Duffy's book can, and does, do is make us realize that the force that transformed medieval England into the British Empire and, most especially, into America, that is, into the freest nations yet created among men, was so powerful that it demolished not a dying and increasingly insignificant Catholic Church, but a healthy one, that was still important to the daily lives of the British people. This perspective allows us to put an end to the demonization and disrespect of Catholicism that has all too often been part and parcel of British history. At the same time it gives us a renewed sense of how remarkable was the transformation of Britain from its medieval iteration to its modern version (modern in this case being the state that existed in Britain after the Glorious Revolution and in the United States after the American Revolution). The Reformation in particular seems all the more worthy of our study when we realize that it may not have been merely an inevitable reaction to a corrupt Church but instead (maybe) a spontaneous movement, simultaneous (or nearly so) with similar movements that reformed politics and economics in equally radical ways.

Stripping of the Altars opens up all of these fascinating avenues of conjecture and more. It is original, authoritative and readable--a very rare trifecta. I can't recommend it highly enough.

(Reviewed:27-Dec-02)

Grade: (A)

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The Stripping of the Altars : Traditional Religion in England (1992)

Intercollegiate Studies Institute Fifty BEST Books of the Century

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