note 2) Duffy develops this perspective in his most recent work, a full-length treatment of Mary published just this week: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). One criticism has been made is that the book says little about religious houses, and groups like the friars. Virtually nothing about the role of the pardoner and the summoner , who of course appear in Chaucer. The use of source material can be questioned. The author draws on 'The Book of Margery Kemp' without mentioning that there is so little evidence that this work was actually read or even circulated at the time of its creation.

Stripping of the Altar - Wikipedia Stripping of the Altar - Wikipedia

Ombres OP, Robert. "Review of 'The Stripping of the Altars', by Eamon Duffy". Moreana Angers. Vol. 30, Iss. 113, (Mar 1993): 97-102 Especially when it came to death. How to die properly was perhaps the main preoccupation of late medieval piety -- as, of course, it had to be when one considers how much depended on it. At a minimum, one had to die in communion, but for any "even cristen" that was only the beginning. Those spared eternal damnation still had to endure the pains of Purgatory, and to do so for unknown lengths of time. Still, the ordeal could be shortened, if not altogether bypassed, through the intercession of the Virgin, the saints or the diligent prayers of the survivors. Winning that intercession was the goal of the ars moriendi, or the doctrine of proper death, and it was an endeavor that claimed the energies, the thoughts and the resources of countless men and women, no matter their rank, wealth or education.David Siegenthaler, writing in the Anglican Theological Review said, "The importance of this book is that it affords opportunity to look broadly and comprehensively at the religious life of women and men before and after the separation from the Roman obedience and so take the measure of that life that in the continuum of English church history it can be noted and honored." 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 was the reason that gilds, by pooling the resources of their members, endowed chantries where Masses could be sung for their dead. It was the reason why even the poorest among the parishioners left money for wax to be used as light before the image of their patron saint, or why the household items, no matter how cherished in life, were left to be repurposed for church service.

Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church Washing of the Altar – The Episcopal Church

A provocative new account of traditional religion in England between 1400 and 1580."— East Anglian Daily Times Candlemas, the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary or, alternatively, of the Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple, was celebrated forty days after Christmas, on 2 February, and constituted the last great festival of the Christmas cycle. 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. [1] Celebrated as a “Greater Double” – that is, of lesser solemnity only than the supreme feasts such as Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, but of equal status to Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, and All Saints – its importance in the popular mind is reflected in the fact that it was one of the days on which, according to the legend of St Brendan, Judas was allowed out of Hell to ease his torment in the sea.[2] 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 candles so offered were part of the laity’s parochial dues, and were probably often burned before the principal image of the Virgin in the church.[3] An account survives from fourteenth-century Friesthorpe in Lincolnshire of a row between the rector and his parish because on the day after Candlemas “maliciously and against the will of the parishioners” he took down and carried off all the candles which the previous day had been set before the Image of the Blessed Virgin, “for devotion and penance”.[4] The blessing of candles and procession took place immediately before the parish Mass, and, in addition to the candles offered to the priest, many others were blessed, including the great Paschal candle used in the ceremonies for the blessing of the baptismal water at Easter and Pentecost. The people then processed round the church carrying lighted candles, and the “Nunc Dimittis” was sung. Mass began immediately afterwards with the singing of verses from Psalm 47, “We have received your mercy, O God, in the midst of your temple.”[5] Duffy renders this world with so much affection and so little interest in even-handedness, that the omissions in his account — chiefly, the structural problems of the indulgence economy — seem beside the point. His concern is not with those structural issues; it is with the libel of “superstition” thrown at people who, even at their most superstitious, simply did their level best to interpret and reinterpret what was nothing less than the official teaching of their church. Besides, the very history of the Reformation in England, with its progress and reversals, seems to speak quite clearly that today’s superstition is yesterday’s dogma. And vice versa.

The confirmed anti-ritualist mistrusts external expression. He values a man’s inner convictions. Spontaneous speech that flows from the heart, unpremeditated, irregular in form, even somewhat incoherent, is good because it bears witness to the speaker’s real intentions… They can’t take it, the… open-minded teachers who seize on a watered-down expression of a faith that has practically lost meaning for them. The Mystery of the Eucharist is too dazzlingly magical for their impoverished symbolic perception…” It was in some ways a dangerous book for an academic to publish, for its author’s empathy for the religious system that the book scrutinised was clear, inevitably inviting the accusation of religious bias. 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”. This seemed to me a curious, even risible suggestion, given that most modern writing about English Reformation history had been produced either from an overtly or discernibly Protestant confessional standpoint, or at any rate from within a culturally Protestant and post-Enlightenment mindset liable to influence historical judgement about the character and worth of medieval Christianity just as surely, if less obviously, as any denominational affiliation.