Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating treatment which answers many questions
Review: Be forewarned - even the most avid students of the Tudor era will find that many of their notions are challenged. The work is overwhelming in its intriguing detail, fleshing out the entire picture of English medieval devotion as well as social conditions, and the impact of certain negative aspects of the Reformation that many of us would prefer not to consider. Challenging and enriching as a work of history, the Stripping of the Altars also will cause the devout to ponder many a point. This is no "light read" - but the time and attention it takes to get through this actually quite readable work will not be stressful, because it is so totally engrossing. Put this on the shelf of anyone who wishes to fulfil the Anglican exhortation to have an inquiring mind.
Rating: 
Summary: weep, weep, o Walsingham...
Review: Eamon Duffy is hell-bent to demonstrate the meaning and legitimacy of traditional English piety, and succeeds by and large with smart scholarship, winningly original ideas, and fret-free, up-tempo prose. The book wears well a mediaevalist scholar's sympathetic penchant for the full color world of his subject; you have no trouble entering Duffy's exotic world. He knocks down the calumny of 'superstition' by REVEALING it with teaching. The Henrician religious revolution is exactingly covered, but forget your mild English sentiments here; the author means to prove his point and does relentlessly. England's masses did NOT rise up and demand what the King unfortunately demanded! Some of the local evidence unearthed by Duffy is among the most compelling in providing armament for his argument that Roman piety remained the daily staple of the common Englishman even as revolution was imposed by royal will. The last section --The Attack on Traditional Religion-- (including a final segment on Elizabeth I) is the best in the book- arguments are focused in, & the prose is clean and responsive. The book is a huge achievment, even at 650+ pages! A fetching bibliography provides extensive evidence of the openness of Duffy's scholarship, and is fascinating marginalia in its own right. Photo of the vandalised bas relief of the mass Sacrifice on the cover is completely moving. No faint-hearted history allowed.
Rating:
Summary: On the contrary
Review: I fear that Mr Armistead fails to appreciate the rigour of Dr Duffy's appraoch to popular Catholicism in sixteenth century England. It is precisely his degree of fastiduous detail in research which has been lacking from an often hypothetically fuelled debate. Without such examination of the experience of Reformation in specific cases, how can the early modern historian safely back up her grand theories? It is a shame that Mr Armistead finds such a wealth of detail a hindrance to his understanding. Duffy's illustration of inertia and gentle resistance to change in the localities is precisely the kind of reaction to externally enforced change which the above reviewer claims is absent from the Stripping of the Altars. Surely better that a revisionist history of such importance is so solidly rooted in tangeable research than left riding high on polemic.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed Feelings
Review: I have mixed feelings about Stripping of the Altars. There's no question it's painstakingly well researched. But I wish more effort would have gone into editing. Frankly, I spent too much time wading through wills and untranslated pre-Elizabethan English. This is a 600 page book that could have been a more readable 450 page book. Much of what Duffy included in the body of his book should have been put in an appendix instead.
Also, I wonder if Duffy had an axe to grind. His book clearly has an anti-Protestant slant to it. Now I don't have the academic background to make a judgement on how fair he is. And there's no question both Protestants and Catholics often conducted themselves poorly in 16th century England.
The book does give an excellent and detailed picture of what pre-Reformation English religion was like. That was probably the biggest benefit to me.
I would suggest English Reformations by Christopher Haigh as a more readable, more balanced overview of the same years Duffy looks at. But if you want to learn about pre-Reformation English religion or if the only English histories you've read make it sound like Jolly Old England merrily cast off popery, then Duffy is well worth the time.
And reading Stripping of the Altars will take time. If you skim through the wills and the unreadable Medieval English and such, I won't tell anyone.
Mark Marshall is the author of God Knows What It's Like to be a Teenager.
Rating:
Summary: More evidence that history really is written by the victors.
Review: Mr. Duffy's book was, in many ways, shocking, but mostly for its decisive demonstration that the popularly understood motives for the English Reformation are in fact grossly MIS-understood. The English were by and large Catholic, and happily so, but their "betters" wanted to better themselves, and that background informs this text well. Also see Michael Wood's mini-series "In Search of Shakespeare" (with companion book), where some on-sight investigation by Mr. Wood reveal the Catholic background of so much of Elizabethan England. And don't forget your Belloc, either. Wood and Belloc would find this book unsurprising in its conclusions.
It ought to be said that what happened to Catholicism in England could, and, with Vatican II, very well might, occur again...
Rating:
Summary: Reformation-Era England Reconsidered
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Reformation-Era England Reconsidered
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, well researched, but ultimately unconvincing
Review: This book attempts to present a revisionist account of the Reformation in England. It argues convincingly that there was a great deal of popular support for Roman Catholic ritual and devotional practises among the people of that time. It does not follow from that fact that allegiance to the Papacy was equally popular. Nor does it take into account the essentially disquieting content of that faith. To be a Christian in those times was to ride a spiritual roller coaster. Those who stumble must be shriven in the Church before they die, lest their entire lives of faith be cancelled out by a single sin. A great deal of anxiety was therefore caused by a Church whose rituals conferred only temporary assurance of salvation, and which swung the faithful in and out of the state of grace, keeping them in constant fear. Many of the devotions whose vitality is argued for seem to rather be quasi-magical practises. Mystic prayers of dubious provenance were circulated, each bearing a warrant of uncertain authority that its repetition frees the devotee's soul from Purgatory, or cancels out so many years of penance in the afterlife. Even the Roman Catholic hierarchy felt moved occasionally to discredit some of the unlikelier devotions, especially once critical attention was being paid to them. It argues that people were busy purchasing decorations and prayers in their church. They may well have been, when they were encouraged to believe their donations were purchasing salvation for themselves and their family members. It still seems obvious that this was a belief system ripe for replacement. Of course, people are naturally conservative in matters of religious worship. Of course, change had to come from the instigation of some advanced thinkers. It is likely that Roman Catholicism remained popular in certain areas until it discredited itself politically as well as religiously, by such major missteps as Bloody Mary's mass executions, and the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada. But ultimately, the devotions whose wide circulation is adequately demonstrated by this book display their own spiritual decrepitude and lack of consolation. This fact seems obvious from the material presented here, and Mr. Duffy ultimately undercuts his own argument by the evidence he presents. Their failure ultimately had something to do with the content of the belief system whose practice is evidenced here.
Rating:
Summary: The stripping of the altars
Review: This book is a masterpice in reference to traditional catholicism in ingland before the reformation. Any one who is not convince as to how deep Traditional Catholisism was in England shuold read this book. I enjoyed it from begining to end.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, wonderful, and thought provoking.
Review: This is the most enjoyable book I've read in the last five years. I learned so much about what the church was like in England before the Reformation. There was so much of this I didn't know, and finding it out was like recovering a long-lost treasure. The details are marvellous. Reading about the changes which came about in the reigns of HenryVIIIth, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth was extremely informative. Now I understand how the reformers and the monarchs who supported them managed to change the church of England from the Catholic church it was into a very different, and very protestant organisation. Whether you have religious inclinations or not, this book is a great read. At the very least, you'll like reading about this period in history. If you're an Anglican, you might be particularly fascinated to read about what your church was like before the Reformation. I was, and I think we lost a lot of the richness of traditional worship when Cramner et all came along and ripped away so many beautiful traditions from the church. I am very grateful to Eamon Duffy for writing such a detailed account, and for making it all such a great read.
| 
