| In this edition of Oriens we launch a new feature: Books Revisited. Books Revisited is a tear away from the grand tradition of reviewing new books. Oriens is going to review the old books (and the not so old) as if they were hot from the presses – or, for that matter, as if the ink were still damp on the parchment. Well, not quite. Our writers will have the benefit of hindsight and reflection: powers rarely deployed (or deployable) in assessing the latest book. In this edition, we kick off with Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. |
Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars, Yale University Press, New Haven and London,
1992, 593pp plus appendices
Reviewed by Carl
Green
The Stripping of the Altars is to the English Reformation what Zola’s J’accuse was to Third Republic France, The Gulag Archipelago to Stalin’s Russia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to modern psychiatry.
It is hardly possible to review in the conventional manner a book published eight years ago. However, this is a foundational text for repairing the reputation of pre-Reformation English Catholicism, and no effluxion of time could dim its brilliance. This work will, or at least ought, to continue in print beyond our lifetimes. It deserves to become a classic like Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, now nearly 200 years old and still in print, and Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, over a century old and still on the presses.
Century too late
This book’s principal problem is that it is at least a century too late. In an age where Nietzsche has won, at least on points, and well-meaning irenicism blunts even genuine and previously sharp differences, this work means little of what it might have in the days of the Gordon Riots or Newman’s celebrated conversion in 1845. Today only someone like Ian Paisley would probably oppose it.
In short, Duffy disposes of two myths central to English life since Elizabeth I’s long, triumphant reign: that English Catholicism at the eve of the Reformation was corrupt, decadent and lacked popular engagement and support; and that the Reformation was a movement of integrity that, with popular support, deposed a decayed religion and replaced it with a church based on evangelical purity and apostolic custom.
Duffy establishes that, in fact, late medieval Catholic culture in England was rich and vibrant. He notes that “traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay, and indeed in a whole host of ways, from the multiplication of vernacular books to adaptations within the national and regional cult of the saints, was showing itself well able to meet new needs and new conditions”.
The common experience
In almost numbing detail, Duffy shows that there was no great distinction between elite and popular piety prior to the 1530s but rather that English Christian life was grounded in the liturgy, whose Latinity was touchingly familiar and loved. The whole of popular culture was deeply suffused with the liturgical and seasonal cycle.
Along the way, Duffy also criticises the preoccupation of English historians with Lollardy and with witchcraft, movements he argues had an insignificant impact on late medieval English Catholic culture.
Duffy shows there was also a strong movement in the 15th and 16th centuries towards popular education of the laity by the clergy. This appetite was fuelled by the availability of printing from the mid 15th century onwards. Very many Catholics owned primers and books of hours, enabling precisely the sort of scriptural and devotional literacy most people associate with the Reformation. This is to say nothing about the iconographic riches to be found in every church - stained glass windows, carvings, rood screens and chantries – which served both aesthetic and didactic purposes, uniting beauty and truth in popular esteem and imagination. Under the relentless, righteous logic of the new gospel they had to go.
The ‘disappeared’
It is remarkable how people admire the bare stone spaces of England’s cathedrals and churches … and how wrongly. Duffy shows how the reformers systematically scraped bare walls and ceilings once riotous with colour and profuse with imagery. Now only a few teasing, pathetic remnants are left, like the ceiling in St Alban’s Cathedral and a fragment of an Assumption mural in the apse of Exeter Cathedral.
It was not only altars and walls, but roods, pyxes, fonts, windows, chalices, vestments too. Duffy has included photos showing some results of this iconoclastic fury – they need no captions. It was theologo-philistinism chilling in its austerity. Even in purely curatorial terms, the destruction of this patrimony constitutes one of the great barbarities committed against art.
Duffy demonstrates methodically how this “violent disruption” called the Reformation wrenchingly displaced English Catholic culture and how Protestantism was imposed - through coercion, spying and disenfranchisement - by a zealous cadre during the 45 long years of Elizabeth’s reign. Indeed, Duffy shows that the Anglican bishops after 1558 were constantly worried by the persistence of Catholic customs and loyalties, which were only gradually and with difficulty eradicated by the beginning of the 17th century.
The mythmakers
It takes considerable detailed historical inquiry and intellectual self-confidence to re-write a national myth that has long enjoyed the patronage of elites, governments and the educational system, no matter how ill-founded. The standard Establishment history of England simply wilts under the weight of the evidence so meticulously and coolly compiled by Duffy.
One can scarcely believe there will be a rebuttal to this book. Rather, it will be amplified as historians, taking this signal lead, unearth the stories reposing in the considerable parish and governmental records the English state so carelessly preserved. This task is already in hand. For example, Duffy credits his fellow historians Colin Richmond, Robert Whiting and Clive Burgess for their detailed local histories of the Reformation in Norfolk and Suffolk, south-west England and Bristol respectively. Expect more of the same. For Anglicans with a conscience and a respect for history this should be a painful, gnawing process.
A book of great and unusual distinction is in our midst. If you can still find it in the shops then buy it. If you can’t, then get a library card and borrow it. Perhaps this review is hyperbolic. But read the book first - you will be riveted. The Stripping of the Altars is sure to make an enduring difference for people of even the slightest religious sensibility. Those for whom the English Reformation is very much unfinished business will find it simply dynamite, but dynamite wrapped carefully in the canons of good scholarship so that it explodes only where and when it should. That still leaves a huge part of English history looking gratifyingly like the Somme circa 1916.
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