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

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For this edition, Duffy has written a new introduction reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period. It challenges the myth and propaganda that has guided our thinking in the English-speaking realms, and beyond them wherever our influence has been felt. I was, and I think we lost a lot of the richness of traditional worship when Cramner et all came along and ripped away so many beautiful traditions from the church.

The Stripping of the Altars’ Candlemas: An Extract from ‘The Stripping of the Altars’

The Purification was marked by one of the most elaborate processions of the liturgical year, when every parishioner was obliged to join in, carrying a blessed candle, which was offered, together with a penny, to the priest at Mass. The texts prescribed for the feast in breviary and missal emphasize the Christmas paradoxes of the strength of the eternal God displayed in the fragility of the new-born child, of the appearance of the divine light in the darkness of human sin, of renewal and rebirth in the dead time of the year, and of the new life of Heaven manifested to Simeon’s, and the world’s, old age. Also, an exegetical study is offered by which one might better understand the relation between the pre-existence of Christ quite prior to and independent of his acts ad extra and pro nobis. Every historian brings to their subject-matter a raft of experience, opinions, attitudes and assumptions that inform their perceptions, and influence both the issues they find interesting, and the questions they bring to their material.When we examine the history of its use across the succeeding decades, however, the principle of the 'analogia fidei' on which the confident steps of Calvin's argument are taken can start to look less like a solid foundational axiom and more like a swaying web of problems, complexities and ambiguities. Duffy examines the factors that contributed to the close lay engagement with the structures of late medieval Catholicism: the liturgy; 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 the lay belief about death and the afterlife.

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He also counters some assertions that English Catholics were half-pagan, tracing many alleged "magical amulets" and incantations to their source: Christian liturgical practice and prayer. In the church discipline controversy of the 1560s and 1570s, Erastus opposed the Calvinist effort to institute a consistory of elders with independent authority over excommunication.The Stripping of the Altar or the Stripping of the Chancel is a ceremony carried out in many Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican churches on Maundy Thursday. Ye pure Virgynes in that ye may or can, with tapers of wax loke ye come forth here and worship this child very god and man Offrid in this temple be his moder dere. With opened eyes I looked again at my well-thumbed copy of Dickens’s The English Reformation… [with its] pained dismissal of medieval religion for “its effort to attain salvation through devour observances, its fantastic emphasis on saints, relics and pilgrimages”… How different all this would look, I realised, if one were to consider the evidence of medieval lay and clerical commonplace books, liturgical and para-liturgical rituals, miracle stories, sacramental observances, processions, prayers and talismans so prominent in late medieval Christianity, not on the premise that they were a meaningless mount of mumbo-jumbo, culpably remote from the personality and teaching of Jesus, strong on magic, weak on personal responsibility but, instead, on the working assumption that they represented the ritual building-blocks of a coherent worldview that expressed itself not in individualist striving after personal authenticity, but in powerful symbolic gestures designed to shape and create community. He also casts doubt on the belief that the Reformers performed valuable services by reviving a moribund church.

The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy | Waterstones The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy | Waterstones

It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed.At a suitable time after the Mass the altar is stripped, usually by the sacristan, and crosses are removed from the church, if possible. In Anglican Churches, this ceremony is also performed at the conclusion of Maundy Thursday services, "in which all appointments, linens, and paraments are removed from the altar and chancel in preparation for Good Friday. There were limits to how far this process could be carried within the formal structure of the liturgy itself, so the Candlemas ceremonies generated para-liturgical and dramatic elaborations.

The Stripping of the Altars - Google Books The Stripping of the Altars - Google Books

In the earlier form of the Roman Rite, the stripping of the altar was done at the end of Mass of the Lord's Supper on Maundy Thursday. By comparing and contrasting some of the similarities and discontinuities of communion frequency debates in the past, it provides theological and historical resources for those who are navigating issues of communion frequency in the present. When Paul wished all prophecy to be made to accord with the analogy of faith [Rom 12:6] he set forth a very clear rule to test all interpretation of Scripture. After outlining what Calvin and Beza did to support and strengthen Calvinist churches in France, the article sets forth and explains the system Calvin devised to hide their ministry from the French Catholic government and probably from the Nicodemites as well. Be forewarned - even the most avid students of the Tudor era will find that many of their notions are challenged.A mighty and momentous book: a book to be read and re-read, pondered and revered; a subtle, profound book written with passion and eloquence, and with masterly control. It is the reason Pride is the queen bee in the hive of the deadly sins; and in humility, Love becomes its opposite, theological virtue. Most of the reviewers commented on the sympathy with which late-medieval popular Catholicism, or, in the book’s preferred term, “traditional religion”, was handled, and more than one suggested that the book marked the regrettable rise or revival of “denominational history”. The effect of this sort of guidance was to encourage the development of representational elements in the liturgy and to set the laity looking for these elements. stripping of the altar: Ceremony at the conclusion of the Maundy Thursday liturgy, in which all appointments, linens, and paraments are removed from the altar and chancel in preparation for Good Friday.