The Stripping of the A... Duffy, Eamon Best Price: $24.48 Buy New $22.00 (as of 07:02 UTC - Details) The Cambridge academic Eamon Duffy first published The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 in 1992. The book’s premise is that the Medieval religion of England, including all of the bells, incense, candles, veneration of saints and pageantry of a highly liturgical religion, was still practiced day in and day out throughout England with vigor and belief when a top-down cultural revolution dissolved this essence of English life over a couple of generations. Duffy explores in detail the beliefs and practices at the parish level and how the grand history affected these pious people. It is rather well known that the Tudor king Henry VIII started the process in order to authorize his serial divorces. But Henry liked many of the old “superstitious” practices of the old religion. So it was only during the short reign (1547-53) of his son, the child king Edward VI, that the radical stripping of the altars occurred. Among the Protestant reformers, like Cranmer and Cromwell who probably were the real powers behind the throne, I am sure there was true belief in their iconoclastic form of Christianity. But to implement their reforms a bureaucracy was needed. Each bit of wealth directed toward Catholic religious practice, from books, to candles, to vestments, and more was winnowed and pillaged. Not directly stated by Duffy, but what I infer from his description of events is a classic money grab. So in the end, to understand the history of this period it is most instructive to follow the money. Even Wikipedia describes the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry as a money grab (See this version of ABBA’s “Money, Money’, Money”). Edward’s half-sister, Mary I, became queen upon his death in spite of his wish that the Catholic Mary not succeed him. She was dubbed “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents for the number of religious dissenters burned at the stake during her reign. This was a short respite for Catholics, as art and color returned to English churches during her reign (1553-58). Mary’ Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded her (the three children of Henry who succeeded him to the throne, like a rock star, were each born from different mothers). During her long reign (1558-1603) Catholic practices were gradually but significantly snuffed out.

A preoccupation of Medievals was the fate of their souls after death.  From the reformers point of view it was the belief in Purgatory, a step of purification before going to heaven, that was a problem. Why was this important? People willed (Duffy gives a lot of evidence from wills) money to be remembered in prayers, masses, and dedications to physical objects in the church that supposedly reduced the soul’s time in Purgatory. Duffy describes the reform process and its effects.

For the reformers this act of distancing was in a sense deliberate, a necessary rite of exorcism. In his Displaying of the popishe Masse Thomas Becon has a passage in which he attacks the whole notion of commemorating the dead. In the course of it, he parodies the bede-roll [a list of people to pray for]: Ten Popes Who Shook th... Duffy, Eamon Best Price: $2.18 Buy New $20.93 (as of 07:02 UTC - Details)

And here in your mind and thoughts . . . ye pray for Philip and Cheny, more than a good meany, for the souls of your great grand Sir and your old Beldam Hurre, for the souls of Father Princhard and of Mother Puddingwright, for the souls of good man Rinsepincher and good wife Pinpot, for the souls of Sir John Huslegoose and Sir Simon Sweetlips, and for the souls of your benefactors . . . friends and well-willers.

This is undeniably effective, a rollicking but ultimately chilling reduction of the dead to the status of figures of fun, figures of contempt. From such puppets it was easy, and better, to be free. It is worlds away from More’s evocation of the dead, a generation before, as “your late acquaintance, kindred, spouses, companions, play felowes, and friendes.” The ripping out of the memorials of the dead, like the three hundredweight “in Brasses” sold to Thomas Sparpoyant at Long Melford for fifty-three shillings in 1548, was the practical enactment of that silencing and distancing. The dead became as shadowy as the blanks in the stripped matrices of their gravestones, where once their images and their inscriptions had named them, and asserted their trust in, and claims on, the living.

Thus, in the end the dead were disappeared from the everyday life of the living and the fabric of the community that bound the generations was torn apart, lessening the richness of future generations. Likewise, the woke iconoclasm of today, with its distortions of the past and destabilization of the present, is sure to damage the cultural fabric of tomorrow.

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