The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

"On certain feasts objects to be blessed might be brought up at this point: candles at Candlemas, butter, cheese, and eggs at Easter, apples on St James's day". A serious piece of historical research that also makes me feel vividly present in late medieval England, joining in the feasts and penances and rituals, and later on helping to hide the church treasures when they were banned. There's no doubt reform was needed, but I believe this traumatic break, a cultural revolution imposed from above, was a massive blow to the English psyche from which it has never really recovered.
Deservedly popular, this book is always going out on request from the public library where I work. ( )

Must-read if you're interested in the Reformation or the history of Anglicanism. Especially if you're an Anglo-Catholic. ( )

This is a classic written by one of the preeminent historians of the Reformation. The first half, and pretty much the majority of the book focuses on teh Catholic Church prior to the Reformation. The last part focuses on the Reformation from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. The book is extremely long but that is because the autor has packed into it extreme amounts of detail as well as research. This historian has done excellent research on this topic which is why the reader can be confident in the information they are getting. The author included pictures throughout the book which helps with bringing the Reformation and the Catholic religion in the 1400s to life for the reader. It also helps make the book a little less tedious to read.

Because there is so much detail contained in this book, it is a long read and can sometimes get a little tedious or slow to read. Because of this, I would not recommend this to anyone who isn't highly interested in the Reformation. ( )

For me, "The Stripping of the Altars" was an eye-opener. Most of us who have a cursory knowledge of the English Reformation have been led to believe that the medieval Roman Catholic Church in England had stagnated, that it was hopelessly corrupt, and that it no longer met the spiritual needs of the English people. Duffy puts the lie to that myth. He shows, instead, that late medieval English Catholicism was alive, vibrant, and relevant.
Why, then, did Henry VIII ultimately succeed with his Reformation? Was it the violence, the threat of torture, of having one's property expropriated, one's family destroyed? Certainly Mary Tudor, in forcibly returning England to the Catholic fold, was guilty of as many excesses as was her despotic father. Yet it took Elizabeth, with her "middle way", to finally secure England for the Protestant cause, albeit at a cost. Neither truly Catholic nor truly Protestant (i.e., Calvinist), Elizabeth and her advisers succeeded in crafting what has today become the Anglican Communion, a most interesting blend of both versions of Christianity. (Indeed, a dear friend of mine, a lapsed Catholic and now an Episcopalian, refers to the U.S. version of Anglicanism as "Catholic lite.")
Those of us who have followed the travails of the Anglican Communion in recent months know just how fragile are the bonds of fellowship holding Anglicanism together. Elizabeth never succeeded in totally reconciling the authoritarian nature of Catholicism with the individuality of Protestantism; the magisterium of the Church pitted against the believer's "walk with Jesus." That tension still exists today in all branches of the Anglican Communion--many yearn for a hierarchy eager to tell the believer how to live, what to believe, and how to get into heaven; certainty as preferable to ambiguity; black and white over shades of gray.
Duffy, to his credit, shows why Catholicism was so compelling to its adherents. Indeed, in reading the memoirs of various Anglicans, lay and clergy, who have converted to Catholicism in the intervening years, in worshiping in the Roman Catholic Mass, and in viewing the travails of 21st century Anglicanism, one understands Catholicism's continuing allure. Duffy's book shows us that the modern Christian's needs aren't so different from those of six centuries ago. ( )

The myths of the English reformation take a body blow from which they will not recover.