Volume 40, Number 15 · September 23, 1993
That Old Time Religion
By Maurice Keen
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580
by Eamon Duffy
Yale University Press, 654 pp., $45.00
Perhaps it takes an Irishman to offer Englishmen (and others) a convincing picture of the religion of the ordinary lay people of England in the age before the Reformation. Over four hundred years following the Elizabethan settlement the established Anglican church developed traditions of worship and practice, focused around the Book of Common Prayer, which became the core of the religious observance and experience of English parishes, a way of church life which their people, at varying levels of individual religiosity, learned to accept as natural. For them, and for British historians born of their stock, the Anglican way became what Eamon Duffy calls their 'traditional religion.' Medieval Roman Catholicism, the outwardly very different 'tradition' in religion, with a thousand-year history behind it, became difficult to remember, and harder still to relate to sympathetically. The evocation of that older, pre-Reformation tradition and of what its observances meant to the laity of its time is the theme of the first part of Dr. Duffy's deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated study.
Review, 3110 words
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