Eamon Duffy recreates 15th-century English laypeople's experience of religion, revealing the richness and complexity of the Catholicism by which men and women structured their experience of the world and their hopes within and beyond it. This book offers a fundamental challenge to much that has been written about the pre-Reformation church.

Part 2 The stripping of the altars: the attack on traditional religion how the plowman learned his Pater Noster.lewd and learned - the laity and the primers.Part 1 The structures of traditional religion: seasons and signs - the liturgical year.He rescues medieval Catholicism from both the caricatures of later Protestantism and the condescension of later Catholicism.Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index. He can explain how, for example, an illiterate people could fully understand a Latin liturgy even if they could not actually translate it. And Duffy, an Irish Catholic born in 1947, understands this tradition in his bones. Others had made similar arguments, and while this picture can be overstated, precious few scholars today reject it entirely.ĭuffy's particular achievement, though, was to show us 'traditional religion' (not 'popular' religion, he insists: the elite shared it, too) at parish level. The argument, essentially, was that pre-Reformation English Catholicism was a vibrant, popular, unified and flourishing tradition a tradition that was then wantonly, deliberately and violently destroyed by a small clique of Protestant extremists. For the heart of Eamon Duffy's achievement was to turn his own religious commitment into a scholarly strength, not the embarrassing peccadillo that such commitment had long been assumed to be.Īs an interpretation of English Reformation history, there was nothing particularly revolutionary about The Stripping of the Altars. Here is a book dedicated to God himself - in the words of the Latin Mass for the dead, no less. What made The Stripping of the Altars (1992) such an earth-shaking book was its full-throated, visceral religiosity.

But it was still a secret, in the sense that most scholars tried to preserve a veneer of Rankean objectivity. It used to be an open secret that most historians of Christianity had axes to grind - partisans fighting their confessional corners, ecumenists trying to spread peace and love, non-believers out to debunk, ex-believers out for revenge.

Duffy stripping of the altars