The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 357 paint the trends of an age in impressionistic strokes backed by a formidable , indeed overwhelming, amount of research (as indicated in the impressive footnotes, pp. 209-252). Yet, as in any masterpiece, one can find a few flaws: sometimes (particularly in Part II), the leitmotiv of " Church and Culture " gets obscured in the details; also, while some portraits, like those of Schell and Hertling, are captivating, others, like those of Schmid and Schanz, seem perfunctory. There are a few typographical errors and other errata; in particular, the Oxford Movement began in 1833, not 1883 (as in the "Synchronology," p. 2) ; also the data on the number and the percentage of German Catholics do not correspond (p. 249, n. 37). Yet, such minor criticisms aside, this work is a notable addition to the literature on nineteenth century theology. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. JOHN T. FORD, c.s.c. The Stripping of the Altars. By EAMON DUFFY. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. 608. $45.00 (cloth). Eamon Duffy's most recent contribution to the debate about the Eng· lish Reformation is a two-edged sword. His goal is to correct two very different errors about the English Reformation, the classic one, the " Whig version," lately and brilliantly set forth by A. G. Dickens in his English Reformation (1964), and the other, the more recent "discontinuity " thesis of John Bossy (The English Catholic Community, 1580-1850) and Hugh Aveling (The Handle and the Axe). Something must be known about the two theses before Duffy's work can be fully appreciated. The Whig Version is the idea that the English Reformation was the necessary, popular, and wholesome reaction to centuries of superstition, corruption, and clerical manipulation by the Roman Church. The people conquered because the people were right. There was Good Queen Bess who was Protestant, and Bloody Mary who was Catholic. It is a theory which has held sway in the popular (and even the intellectual) mind of England for the last four hundred years. Bossy and Aveling make the combined (and seemingly different) point that the Roman Catholic Church which re-surfaced in England in the 1800s cannot lay claim to representing the Church catholic because it broke radically with its own traditions in the late 1500's. Trent had no effect on a dwindling English Catholic Church, which became no more than a separating community. Aveling curiously uses an in- 358 BOOK REVIEWS organic example to underline his contention that there was an organic discontinuity. His grandfather's axe had hung over the mantel and eventually had its blade and handle replaced. The Roman Catholic Church in England, said Aveling, was continuous with its medieval counterpart only in the same sense that the axe over the mantel is the same as his grandfather's. It is a theory which depends on Dickens because it makes popularity, or the majority, the determining factor of the Church catholic. Refuting all of this is a big order and is accomplished most effectively in Duffy's encyclopedic account of the pre-Reformation Church. This information has long been the missing piece of the Reformation puzzle, and Duffy has finally catalogued it-with results that are devastating to the causes of the above-mentioned historians. Duffy has found, through the same exacting local research that is being applied to the English Reformation itself, that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was not corrupt and was popularly practiced by both peasants and gentry. Related to this, Duffy discovers that the distinction between the educated spirituality of the elite and the " superstitious " practices of the illiterate populace was not so decisive as has been proposed by Jean Delumeau . Invocations against the devil, for example, were not the exclusive domain of illiterate husbandmen, hut were part of the mainstream , both clerical and lay, educated and uneducated, and found expression in the liturgy itself. " They did not have a different religion. . . . Late medieval Catholicism was a broad Church" (p. 298). Furthermore , Duffy finds that this pre-Reformation Church was well-informed as to the meaning of sacraments, ceremonies, and creed, and was in good shape morally when the Reformation struck. Duffy accomplishes...