"This important and provocative book offers a fundamental challenge to much that has been written about the pre-Reformation church. Eamon Duffy recreates fifteenth-century English lay people's experience of religion, revealing the richness and complexity of the Catholicism by which men and women structured their experience of the world and their hopes within and beyond it. He then tells the powerful story of the destruction of that Church - the stripping of the altars - from Henry VIII's break with the papacy until the Elizabethan settlement. Bringing together theological, liturgical, literary, and iconographic analysis with historical narrative, Duffy argues that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented the violent rupture of a popular and theologically respectable religious system." "The first part of the book reviews the main features of religious belief and practice up to 1536. Duffy examines the factors that contributed to the close lay engagement with the structures of late medieval Catholicism: the liturgy that was widely understood even though it was in Latin; the impact of literacy and printing on lay religious knowledge; the conventions and contents of lay prayer; the relation of orthodox religious practice and magic; the Mass and the cult of the saints; and lay belief about death and the afterlife. In the second part of the book Duffy explores the impact of Protestant reforms on this traditional religion, providing new evidence of popular discontent from medieval wills and parish records. He documents the widespread opposition to Protestantism during the reigns of Henry and Edward, discusses Mary's success in reestablishing Catholicism, and describes the public resistance to Elizabeth's dismantling of parochial Catholicism that did not wane until the late 1570s. A major revision to accepted thinking about the spread of the Reformation, this book will be essential reading for students of British history and religion."--BOOK JACKET.
Traditional religion in England c.1400-c.1580.
Pt. I. The Structures of Traditional Religion -- A. Liturgy, Learning and the Laity -- 1. Seasons and Signs: the Liturgical Year -- The Ceremonies of Holy Week -- Sacred Place, Sacred Time -- "Sacred" and "Secular" Time? -- 2. How the Plowman learned his Paternoster -- Priests, People, and Catechesis -- The Impact of Catechesis: Imagery and Dramatic Evidence -- The Impact of Literacy: Lay Didactic and Devotional Collections -- The Coming of Print -- B. Encountering the Holy -- 3. The Mass -- Seeing the Host -- Seeing and Believing -- "Dredd" into "Sweetness" -- Spectators or Participants? Lay Religion and the Mass -- Praying the Mass: the Individual's Experience -- Praying the Mass: Privatization? -- Praying the Mass: the Parochial Experience -- Making the Peace -- 4. Corporate Christians -- Gild and Parish -- 5. The Saints -- The Saints in their Images -- "The debt of interchanging neighborhood" -- Old and New Allegiances -- Holiness and Help -- Coins, Candles, and Contracts -- Gift, Grace, and Fellow-feeling -- Pilgrimage -- St Walstan of Bawburgh -- C. Prayers and Spells -- 6. "Lewed and Learned": the Laity and the Primers -- The Primer and Lay Prayer -- 7. The Devotions of the Primers -- Devotions to the Passion -- The Mass of St Gregory and the Wounds of Jesus -- The Seven Words on the Cross -- Devotions to the Virgin -- 8. Charms, Pardons and Promises: Lay Piety and "Superstition" in the Primers -- Pardons and Promises -- D. Now, and at the Hour of Our Death -- 9. Last Things -- The Image of Death -- The Hour of Death -- Ars Moriendi -- Death and Memory -- 10. The Pains of Purgatory -- Purgatory: Ante-room of Heaven or Outpost of Hell? -- Christendome and Kindred -- Ways of Deliverance: Shortening the Pains of Purgatory -- The Works of Mercy -- The Rejection of Penny Doles -- Bridges and Highways -- Prayers and Supplications -- Pt. II. The Stripping of the Altars, 1530-1580 -- 11. The Attack on Traditional Religion I: From the Break with Rome to the Act of Six Articles -- 12. The Attack on Traditional Religion II: To the Death of Henry VIII -- 13. The Attack on Traditional Religion III: The Reign of Edward VI -- 14. The Impact of Reform: Parishes -- 15. The Impact of Reform: Wills -- 16. Mary -- Religious Priorities in Marian England -- The Marian Primers -- The Programme in the Parishes -- The Visitation of Kent, 1557 -- 17. Elizabeth.