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5.0 out of 5 stars
Reformation-Era England Reconsidered, Jun 2 2001
The Stripping of the Altars is excellent in every way. Duffy has examined up parish records, scoured primary sources, and provided a superlative overall view of pre-Reformation English Catholicism.The Lollards, minor pre-Lutheran dissenters whose influence, beliefs, and practices have been listed as evidence of tumult in the English church, are also succinctly covered. Duffy casts doubt on their reputation, which has sometimes been blown out of proportion by Protestant scholars. Catholic life was flourishing in the era, as parish records attest. A major social center of the time, attendance was high and community guilds furnished the physical building, assisting funerals and providing some paid employment to the poor. The belief in Purgatory was hardly questioned, and practices of remembering the dead in prayer continued in many areas until the 1700s--despite sustained Protestant attack on the doctrine. Though Duffy does not bring in this particular work, Catholic purgatorial beliefs are featured in Shakespeare's Hamlet, written a generation after the official break with Rome. Detailed, too, are the many devotional works of the period, which with the advent of the printing press had become inexpensive enough even for the lower middle class. He also counters some assertions that English Catholics were half-pagan, tracing many alleged "magical amulets" and incantations to their source: Christian liturgical practice and prayer. Most sorrowful are his photographs and catalogues of vandalized statuary and churches, whose desecration was strongly supported by Cramner, his iconoclastic lackeys--and very few others. Whatever the Protestant movement was elsewhere, in England, at least, it was largely imposed from the top.
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by Dr. Eamon Duffy
by Dr. Eamon Duffy
by Peter Wilson
