Books, Films Etc
Feb. 1st, 2004 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanDuffy, The Stripping of the Altars.
It cannot be denied that even today, with religion not a priority for many in England, this is a highly contentious work: I was recently talking to one academic who described it (after admitting it was very readable and enjoyable) as "an appalling piece of papist apologetics". OK, he said it with a smile, but still.
Duffy's main point can be expressed quite simply: contrary to what first Establishment and then Marxist historians have claimed, the English reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI was extremely unpopular with the majority of the common people of England. (Shades of Patrick Merrick expounding the Western Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace to a baffled Nicola Marlowe come to mind, but since only a few of those of you who may be reading this will have any clue what I am on about I shall develop that thought no further: ask these people.) He doesn't really deal with Elizabeth, and rightly so I think, by then things were rather different.
Rightly, considering the point he is making, Duffy pays very little attention at all to what most people think of as the Henrician Reformation: the dissolution of the monasteries. His concern is with parish churches up and down the land, and the way that the way in which they worked was torn apart, and with it the day to day social life and customs of much of the country, inextricably tied up with religious life as that was.
Some years ago I read a work which Duffy embarked upon after this, The Voices of Morebath. This, one of the most fascinating pieces of social history I have ever read, uses the unusually detailed accounts and records of one small Devon parish, running for a generation to explore the way that small society, (with no resident aristocracy, which is significant) operated its parish, in both civil and religious senses for a distinction is impossible, affairs. One particular point which comes across very clearly is the extent to which laymen, and indeed women, were in control of the finances: responsibility for holding each of the various "stores" moved around the parish according to a rota, from household to household year after year. Duffy pushes much the same line in this case study as he does in the broader work, and he finds evidence for it in the funds that are spent and the way things change as the reformation carried on.
Essentially, Duffy is arguing that popular religion was alive, not a mere matter of rote, that people did care, very deeply and not purely through natural conservatism. I have always been more prepared to accept that people, including intelligent and educated people genuinely believe and have believed, than many people I have spoken to and read.
It can't be denied that this book is written from a bias, and is deliberately contentious. Duffy is, I think, a practicing if liberal Catholic, and the book probably appeals to Catholics, including agnostic and heretical lapsed liberal Catholics like myself, more than it does to others. But his evidence is properly organised and analysed, and forms an imposing mass, and I think that even after discounting for bias one is left with a strong impression that the history of the English Reformation as taught for generations in our schools is perhaps Not All That It Seems.
It cannot be denied that even today, with religion not a priority for many in England, this is a highly contentious work: I was recently talking to one academic who described it (after admitting it was very readable and enjoyable) as "an appalling piece of papist apologetics". OK, he said it with a smile, but still.
Duffy's main point can be expressed quite simply: contrary to what first Establishment and then Marxist historians have claimed, the English reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI was extremely unpopular with the majority of the common people of England. (Shades of Patrick Merrick expounding the Western Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace to a baffled Nicola Marlowe come to mind, but since only a few of those of you who may be reading this will have any clue what I am on about I shall develop that thought no further: ask these people.) He doesn't really deal with Elizabeth, and rightly so I think, by then things were rather different.
Rightly, considering the point he is making, Duffy pays very little attention at all to what most people think of as the Henrician Reformation: the dissolution of the monasteries. His concern is with parish churches up and down the land, and the way that the way in which they worked was torn apart, and with it the day to day social life and customs of much of the country, inextricably tied up with religious life as that was.
Some years ago I read a work which Duffy embarked upon after this, The Voices of Morebath. This, one of the most fascinating pieces of social history I have ever read, uses the unusually detailed accounts and records of one small Devon parish, running for a generation to explore the way that small society, (with no resident aristocracy, which is significant) operated its parish, in both civil and religious senses for a distinction is impossible, affairs. One particular point which comes across very clearly is the extent to which laymen, and indeed women, were in control of the finances: responsibility for holding each of the various "stores" moved around the parish according to a rota, from household to household year after year. Duffy pushes much the same line in this case study as he does in the broader work, and he finds evidence for it in the funds that are spent and the way things change as the reformation carried on.
Essentially, Duffy is arguing that popular religion was alive, not a mere matter of rote, that people did care, very deeply and not purely through natural conservatism. I have always been more prepared to accept that people, including intelligent and educated people genuinely believe and have believed, than many people I have spoken to and read.
It can't be denied that this book is written from a bias, and is deliberately contentious. Duffy is, I think, a practicing if liberal Catholic, and the book probably appeals to Catholics, including agnostic and heretical lapsed liberal Catholics like myself, more than it does to others. But his evidence is properly organised and analysed, and forms an imposing mass, and I think that even after discounting for bias one is left with a strong impression that the history of the English Reformation as taught for generations in our schools is perhaps Not All That It Seems.
