The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

CITATION: Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400-C.1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did traditional English religion function before the Henrician reformation?
• Answer: Traditional--more widely held than "popular"--religion regularly included commoners and guilds in feasts, fasts, and rituals that show the broad base of English Catholicism, which fell to the reformation on the strength of early Tudor authority.
• Method: The first two-thirds of Duffy's book cover various aspects of traditional religion, and the final third covers the reformation. In the chapters on traditional religion, Duffy itemizes traditional observances and explores their function at multiple levels of society. The reformation chapters are a more straightforward narrative.
• Assumptions: Duffy responds to a Protestant, Whiggish perspective on religion in England 1400-1580. That is a perspective that views traditional religion as oppressive, superstitious, and ripe for revolt.
• Sententiae:
• "To judge by the amount of interest that has been shown in them, the English religious landscape of the late Middle Ages was peopled largely by Lollards, witches, and leisured, aristocratic ladies. It is my conviction, and a central plank of the argument of the first part of this book, that no substantial gulf existed between the religion of the clergy and the educated elite on the one hand and that of the people at large on the other." (2)
• "In a famous passage of Actes and Monuments, John Foxe asserted the incompatibility of popery and printing: 'How many presses there be in the world, so many block houses there must be against the high castle of St Angelo, so that either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing, or printing must at length root him out.' Had Foxe attended to the history of printing in and for England until the early 1530s, he would not have made this claim. The advent of printing in the 1470s and the enormous surge in numbers of publications after 1505 did not flood the reading public with reforming tracts or refutations of the real presence." (77)
• "... [T]here is an evident preoccupation with the refutation of attacks on the sacramental teaching of the Church in much fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writing about the power and pre-eminent sanctity of the Eucharist... Grace came by gazing on the Host: to see it was to be blessed. But what one saw was misleading, and Lollardry was only possible because the appearance of bread in the Host cloaked the divine reality which was the true source of blessing." (102)
• "The saint's heroically maintained virginity was important not primarily as an example to be followed in all its craggy contradiction, but rather as the source of their special intercessory relationship with Christ... These virgin saints an their male counterparts were invoked by the prosperous and pious donors of the East Anglian screens not as exemplars calling away from marriage and money-making, nor as patterns of perpetual chastity or defiant disobedience to patriarchy and government, but as helpers of those who would 'have their boon or else a better thing'..." (178)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Frankly I'll have to revisit this. There's too much raw information to process on this schedule, which I believe is a mark of quality.
• Synthesis: Duffy's scholarship seems incompatible with Eisenstein's account of the Printing Revolution. Duffy seems to be working with a much shorter window of observation. I'll have to revisit the Johns-Eisenstein debate.
• Application: A few stray thoughts:
• The saintly image is profoundly anti-mimetic; it is not of this world, it seeks to transfigure the world. Therefore some of the Protestant objections to the representation of Biblical figures accomplishes two things. First and most obviously, it guarantees that grace is achieved only through the Spirit. Second, it promotes a materialist realism within the arts, even as a compliment to low-church Protestantism.
• Foxe's progressive view of print history seems at odds with a profoundly Christian eschatology. Why should it matter that the Pope lose the print war, since Christ is surely coming soon?