The Stripping of the Altars

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In the Preface to the second edition, Duffy says, "[t]he book was thus intended as a contribution towards a reassessment of the popularity and durability of late medieval religious attitudes and perceptions..."^[2]

While its title suggests a focus on iconoclasm, with an allusion to the ceremony of stripping the Altar of its ornaments in preparation for Good Friday, its concerns are broader, dealing with the shift in religious sensibilities in English society between 1400 and 1580. In particular, the book is concerned with establishing, in intricate detail, the religious beliefs and practices of English society in the century or so preceding the reign of Henry VIII.

Prior to the 1980s, academic consensus seemed to be that the English Reformation was a response to an immoral clergy and an ineffective institutional Church.^[3] Sometimes referred to as "the Whig version", this view held that prior to the Reformation, the English church was corrupt, full of superstition, and long-overdue for reform. This was the view presented by A. G. Dickens, whose 1964 English Reformation was, for many years the standard text on the subject.^[4]

The main thesis of Duffy's book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health immediately prior to the English Reformation. Duffy's argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large. And that the English Reformation was unwanted by and unwelcome to the general population, who had "a remarkable degree of imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum."^[5]

Duffy's work contains an abundance of primary sources.^[3] Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Duffy focuses on how the liturgical calendar, with its fasts and festivals, shaped believers' "perception of the world and their place in it."^[6] Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practised by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. A key point that Duffy makes, aiming to refute Jean Delumeau's contention on the matter, is that there was no substantial difference between the religious beliefs and practices of the educated classes (the clergy and the temporal elite) on the one hand and those of the wider populace on the other.^[4] Earlier historians' claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing 'corporate' nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.

The second part of Duffy's book concentrates on the accelerated implementation of Protestantism in the mid sixteenth century. It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed. Duffy uncovers a succession of records, notes and images that individually reveal an assortment of changes to liturgy and custom but taken together build up to demonstrate a colossal change in English religious practice.

The Reformation was a painful process for those who remained Catholic instead of converting to Protestantism, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of Catholics stripped of their familiar spiritual nourishment. (One of Duffy's later studies, The Voices of Morebath, focuses on how the eponymous Devonshire village reacted to these changes.)

Duffy also uses the second section to highlight the brief flame of optimism felt by Catholics ignited by the reign of the Catholic Mary from 1553 to 1558, a flame quickly extinguished by Mary's death. But ultimately, the Marian reign is a secondary issue. Duffy's narrative demonstrates how centuries of religious practice evaporated in the face of fierce centralist control.

David Siegenthaler, writing in the Anglican Theological Review said, "The importance of this book is that it affords opportunity to look broadly and comprehensively at the religious life of women and men before and after the separation from the Roman obedience and so take the measure of that life that in the continuum of English church history it can be noted and honored."

Duffy argues that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was not as corrupt as some historians have believed. He also casts doubt on the belief that the Reformers performed valuable services by reviving a moribund church.^[7]

For the second edition, released in 2005, Duffy wrote a Preface reflecting on recent developments in understanding the book's subject matter and on the book's reception, with this latter reflection including a response to certain criticisms of its contents. The third edition, released in 2022, adds a second Preface in which Duffy details how the book came to be and gives a further response to its critics:

How different all this (medieval religion) would look, I realized, if one were to consider the evidence of medieval lay and clerical commonplace books, liturgical and para-liturgical rituals, miracle stories, sacramental observances, processions, prayers and talismans so prominent in late medieval Christianity, not on the premise that they were a meaningless mound of mumbo-jumbo, culpably remote from the personality and teaching of Jesus, strong on magic, weak on personal responsibility but, instead, on the working assumption that they represented the ritual building-blocks of a coherent world-view that expressed itself not in individualist striving after personal authenticity, but in powerful symbolic gestures designed to shape and create community.