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

Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580

Eamon Duffy

Yale University Press, $45, 654 pp.

One of the more amusing, if entirely inconsequential, disputes in the history of scholarship is the debate over whether Shakespeare was a Catholic or an Anglican. What keeps this little contretemps all a-boil is not just the dearth of biographical details about the Bard, but also Shakespeare' s own protean imagination: why are friars so sympathetically portrayed in his plays? Oh? say the skeptics: then what means the antipapal tone of King John? But, the other side says, don't forget the sympathetic treatment of Catherine of Aragon in Henry VIII[

A fit subject for one of Alexander Pope's mock epics, perhaps, but otherwise hardly worth wasting much ink or energy over. But while ! was reading Eamon Duffy's fascinating book on the revolution in religion that swept through England before and through the first part of Shakespeare's life, this peculiar little debate kept coming to mind--and above all, that haunting line from one of his sonnets (no. 73): "Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." One renowned Shakespeare scholar, Philip Edwards, the King Alfred Professor at the University of Liverpool, says of that line and this debate: "If that line, in context, does not express sadness about the course which the juggernaut of history had taken in England in the sixteenth century, poetry is a mere rhapsody of words ."

And that line is also clearly the best way of summarizing the main point of Duffy's vast and teeming book: what Shakespeare penned in just that one, five-beat line sums up, for Dully, the attitude of the vast majority of the English people toward the reform of the liturgy under Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's loyal archbishop of Canterbury. The book setting out this daring argument is almost crushingly large, but as the reader begins the plunge, it soon becomes clear why Dully must bear down on the reader with such relentless overkill. This is a work of revisionist history so daring, so innately interesting, so rich in admonitory tales for today, so against the grain of received wisdom, that only a full lawyer's brief would suffice to establish its thesis.

Dully leaves no aspect of his difficult case, it seems, to the hunches and surmises of his putative jury. All is laid out, everything is argued: exhibits are properly labeled, witnesses duly subpoenaed and cross-examined, all to drive home this single point: that the Roman-affiliated church in England from 1400-1580 was not the decadent branch of corrupt priestcraft and popular superstition so beloved of the conventional wisdom of historians, a church that was nearly ready to fail off, needing only the pruning shears of the Reformers.

Dully sets out his case in two parts. The first deals with the fifteenth century and surveys (what seems like all) the evidence about popular attitudes toward the institutions of Roman Christianity throughout the land of England. Among his startling conclusions can be listed the following: there was close lay engagement with the structures of the Roman church; the liturgy was widely understood even though it was in Latin; there was an inner harmony between the reading habits generated by the printing press and the devotions encouraged by the clergy; and the medieval doctrines of Christian eschatology were almost universally accepted.

What then caused the break with tradition and how did it succeed, seemingly so effortlessly? This constitutes the second part, and here again we encounter revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. Dully massively documents a widespread opposition, across all social classes, to Protestantism during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. He then goes on to show how far and how fast Queen Mary moved to reestablish the ancient regime, and how she was on the verge of succeeding before her death. And only with Elizabeth's systematic dismantling of parochial Catholicism were the people robbed of that necessary oxygen that makes Christian sacramental life possible. The book ends at 1580, so the role of Spain's diplomatic machinations, not to mention Guy Fawkes, is perhaps not given its rightful due. And although Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, this too is ignored, rather to the detriment of Duffy's thesis, though he makes clear that both before and after 1570, "dislike of change, Catholic instincts, hope for a speedy restoration of the old ways, and Tudor thrift, combined to struggle against the instinctive obedience of well-schooled subjects, in a conflict not strong enough for resistance, but which ensured widespread inertia and concealment."

Another remarkable feature of the book is the combination of skills which Dully has marshaled to establish his thesis. Part 1 is written more or less in the Annales school of historiography, patiently assembling the relatively "silent" evidence of wills, tombstones, mnemonic lyrics used to teach catechism to the unlettered, etc., while part 2 is narrative history at its most thrilling. Seeing the transformation of English Catholicism from Henry's first inklings of disquiet over the lack of a male heir to the final Elizabethan settlement under the Cranmer thumb is like watching an earthquake in slow motion. One moment, the world is at peace, and all and sundry are going about their business, and suddenly (as history measures these things), the landscape has been completely transformed, and not a stone is left atop another.

Judging by the ample photographs accompanying the text, this metaphor, it seems, can also be taken literally. The sheer amount of destruction of statues and frescoes-heads and hands lopped off, choir stalls vandalized, paintings defaced (including one of Christ's Scourging at the Pillar, a particularly ironic desecration)forms a kind of Greek chorus to the text, showing how relentless the destructive power of the iconoclastic temper could be. (The $45 price might seem steep until one realizes that the book has 654 pages, not including the glossy inserts of 141 photographs intercalated throughout part 1.)

The publisher's blurb on the dust-jacket claims that this study will be of interest not just to specialists of the time but to any student of religion--a rare example of understatement for a dust cover. For the book does indeed show just how fragile institutional Christianity can be in the face of determined opposition from the powers that be. One need only think of, for example, the policy of the shoguns in Japan in the seventeenth century, or the disappearance of Christianity in North Africa outside of Egypt after the advent of Islam. Or, on a much more minor scale, some of the liturgical reforms after Vatican II.

Longtime readers of Commonweal might recall (now Appeals Court Judge) John Noonan's article several years back lamenting the pedestrian translations of the Bible now used in Catholic services. He particularly bemoaned the phrase "and there was no room for them at the place where travellers lodge" (instead of the traditional "there was no room for them at the inn"). Not only does this weird circumlocution substitute a clumsy phrase for a perfectly suitable English term, but it also cannot help but conjure up the motel chain Travellers' Lodge, with its 1ogo of a Teddy Bear in PJ' s.

One's position on specific texts can vary, of course. My small point, a familiar one, is that we have now raised a generation of Catholics who have no sense of the cadence of biblical prose. Why was it assumed that only the most demotic and colloquial English would serve the needs of the faithful? How much American Catholics were in fact starving for more Madison Avenue English in the liturgy is a question that, among many others, one cannot help asking after concluding this astonishing and magnificent piece of work.