Eamon Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars

This is a fascinating and comprehensive account of the impact of the English Reformation on the people of England in particular how they practised their religion and how they understood their world. Eamon Duffy is a master at mining church records for the minutiae of everyday life, as his wonderful book The Voices of Morebath showed. In The Stripping of the Altars he takes this to a new level, giving an over-view of a couple of centuries of change.

A key point that Duffy makes is that there is no "substantial gulf" between the religion of the clergy and the elite and the mass of the population. While the more well off may have had better religious books, nicer churches and so on, the actuality of how they worshipped and what they believed was near identical. Nor was this a period where the mass of the population was kept in ignorance while the ruling class had all the knowledge - one of the main arguments here is that there was wide knowledge of church doctrine. For instance, on the "eve of the Reformation" there were some 50,000 Books of Hours in circulation, many of them produced in cheap editions in continental "factories" aimed at a mass audience.

Duffy uses the phrase "traditional religion" to describe religious beliefs and practises before the Reformation. His detailed reconstruction of what this entails is fascinating. For instance, he shows how the life of rural villages was dominated by a "liturgical calendar". This had major implications for economic (agricultural) life, as there were "almost seventy days in the year when adults were obliged to fast" and numerous feast days when work was not permitted and the laity were expected to attend services. For the whole population the religious dynamic, its calendar, its sequence of religious services, the way that the church prepared its followers for life, and death, was central to how people lived. As Duffy notes, "for townsmen and countrymen alike, the rhythms of the liturgy on the eve of the Reformation remained the rhythms of life itself."

Duffy distances his analysis from those who saw within the traditional church a tendency to hold onto older, "pagan" practises. He shows how many beliefs, such as superstitions or astrology, where incorporated into religious practice. He also shows how the Protestant suppression of many aspects of traditional worship (Duffy uses a fascinating example of religious plays) helped to undermine wider knowledge of religious doctrine. Take the example of The Kalender of Shepherdes,  a book translated from French in the early 1500s. It was a "beautiful and an unmistakably lay book... an extraordinary mixture of calendrical, astrological and medical lore, together with orthodox religious instruction imaginatively presented". As Duffy points out, many clergy would have found the mix uncomfortable, but the popularity of the Kalender was in its ability to create an

assimilation into popular culture, by commercial publishers for a mass audience, of the official educational programme of the Church.... the Kalender certainly found a readership which would have considered unpalatable many more over didactic treatises, for it was common place of the time... that the people were often resistant to catechesis.

The pre-Reformation traditional religion that Duffy describes was an all encompassing explanation for the world as it was and how it would be. It's focus on death was not a morbid obsession with human mortality, but a response to a religious view that placed the afterlife as a key question for the living, and indeed often saw the dead as remaining connected to the living community. This is the importance of the question of indulgences that were exchanged for prayers etc. Some of the most fascinating aspects of Duffy's book are the chapters were he examines what death meant for people of the late Middle Ages and how it affected their everyday lives.

The second half of the book is a look at how the English Reformation played out. Here I felt the work wasn't as strong as the first half. This is not because Duffy's use of the historic material is weaker, in fact his detailed examination of what the Reformation meant in practice, in terms of changes to religious practices, the removal of feast and Saints days, changes to books and bibles and the physical alterations to religious spaces is fascinating and detailed. The weakness arises more out of Duffy's failure to see the Reformation as being linked to the changes taking place in the English economy. He does note in places the class content to the Reformation, and the way that how the Reformation proceeds is closely linked to the class interests of individuals. In places he does come close to this, so I would be wrong to completely dismiss Duffy's analysis here. For instance he writes

There can have been few if any communities in which Protestants formed anything like an actual numerical majority. The influence of the reform usually stemmed from the not always very secure social and economic prestige of its more prosperous or articulate adherents.

But this is to ignore the fact that the real influence of Protestants was making itself felt at a different level in society - some of the key figures in the English state. This is why the Reformation could proceed even though Henry VIII was a traditionalist at heart and why it could be reversed briefly under Mary's reign. When revolt did break out against the changes, such as the Prayerbook Rebellion or the Pilgrimage of Grace, what mattered for the ruling class was the mobilisation of armed bodies of men. Thus we have to see the Reformation in terms of the different class interests it represented and sadly I felt that Duffy is a little weak on this.

The Reformation took a long time. The changes that were driven through did not simply abolish the beliefs in peoples heads. The resurgence of Catholicism under Mary saw many worshippers gladly return to traditional practises. In many examples digging up the statues they'd hidden, rescuing the church cloths and candlesticks and re-writing their wills in ways that reflected their traditional beliefs. But the Reformation did eventually transform England's Church because it was closely linked to the development of a new economic system. Duffy sees the Protestant Church's success as being mostly due to the way that ordinary people responded, "By the end of the 1570s, whaever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believe d the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world."

This is true to a large extent. But England kept the Protestant faith as its official religion because its proponents where the new ruling class. For that to be cemented for good eventually required a revolution and the shattering of monarchical power for good.

Despite the weaknesses I think that Eamon Duffy's book has, I have no hesitation in recommending it anyone who wants to understand more about the Reformation and what it meant for ordinary people. It brings alive the lives and struggles of those who lived in villages across England whose world was shattered by the changes.

Related Reviews

Duffy - Voices of Morebath
MacCulloch - Reformation
Wilson - The People and the Book
Wood - The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England
Tawney - Religion and the Rise of Capitalism