Semper Reformanda and the “Fiddler on the Roof”

Since Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400--c. 1580 recently was released in a second edition, I decided to post a review I wrote several years ago for the first edition of this significant contibution to the literature on early modern England.

Semper Reformanda and the “Fiddler on the Roof:” A Review of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400—c. 1580

Along with the solas of the Reformation—sola fide, solo Christo, sola scriptura, sola gratiae, and soli deo Gloria—Protestants adopted another slogan, semper reformanda. By this axiom, they meant that the “one holy catholic church,” to quote the Apostles’ Creed, should constantly evaluate itself and make changes as demanded by their respective authorities. This concept of “always reforming” protected the church from getting trapped by its own traditions. In The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400—c. 1580, a masterful revision of English religion before and during the Henrician Reformation, Eamon Duffy argues that the Protestant Reformation decimated the vibrant and living Catholicism of late medieval England. Ultimately, while his analysis leads one to think in new and challenging ways regarding the extent of religion in pre-Reformation England and the image of several key English leaders, namely, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, Duffy overstates the dichotomy between traditionalists and religious radicals.

To grasp the significance of Duffy’s revision of late medieval England, a brief survey of the literature is helpful. One of the principal ways scholars treat the Reformation is by focusing on the importance of the ideas and ideological systems of the period, specifically those of the major reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Taking a different route, denominational historians interpret the subject in light of their respective denominations, with their personal religious convictions normally providing the impetus for their studies. Additionally, materialist historians following the lead of Karl Marx stress the class conflict evident in the religious battles of the Reformation. Possibly influenced to some extent by each of these methodologies, Duffy writes largely from the perspective of a new social and cultural historian. Due to this social and cultural influence, he concentrates on the ordinary and extraordinary participants of the various reform movements. Combined with his argument regarding the viability of medieval English Catholicism, this focus on the ordinary layperson allows him to revise the standard interpretation of Reformation England.

In light of this scholarship, Duffy paints his portrait of England’s religious landscape, demonstrating the vibrancy of religion in late medieval England. He emphasizes the hold that Catholicism had over all of society, arguing that “late medieval religion was both enormously varied and extremely tightly knit: any thread pulled from the multicouloured pattern will lead us eventually to its centre” (Duffy, 6). The threads he pulls are the medieval understandings of the liturgy, the church’s communal atmosphere, prayers, and death and the afterlife. In each of these areas, Duffy’s approach demands a reevaluation of many common assumptions concerning English religion.

First, he illustrates that the church’s liturgy was more than merely a plan for worship. It was also “the key to the meaning and purpose of their lives” (11). By this he means that laity as well as clergy used the liturgy of the church to make sense of both their religious and regular lives, countering Charles Phythian-Adams’s argument that time was strictly divided between sacred and secular. In his sketch of medieval England’s average men and women, Duffy clearly shows the priority of religion in their lives. In so doing, he begins to dispel the myth that the Roman Catholic faith of the age was on the wane. Instead, he proves that “the rhythms of the liturgy on the eve of the Reformation remained the rhythms of life itself” (47-52).

Second, he explores the ways in which Christians in late medieval England fostered a sense of community. Since the “liturgy lay at the heart of medieval religion, and the Mass lay at the heart of the liturgy,” Duffy initially centers on the communal aspects of participation in the Mass. While he does not claim that every Christian experienced the Mass in the same way, he clearly demonstrates that the laity actively participated in a sacrament characterized by “dynamism and zest,” not dullness and apathy (91, 129). The willing participation in confraternal organizations represented another manner in which ordinary men and women took part, both physically and financially, in medieval religion. In fact, belonging to a confraternity was “more often than not simply one of the conventional ways of being an active parishioner” (154). Moreover, the cult of the saints provided another means of lay participation. Viewing the saints as exemplars, helpers, and healers, the medieval laity constructed a community that extended beyond the limits of earthly life. In short, whether through the sacrament of the Mass, confraternal societies, or the honor paid to the saints, ordinary people lived and moved within the community of believers (178).

Third, in order to stress the vitality of their faith, Duffy analyzes the way the laity of late medieval England prayed. Appealing to valuable primary sources, such as the writings of Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle, he illustrates the ways in which the exercise of prayer pervaded nearly every aspect of life (211). Perhaps the most striking feature of Duffy’s discussion of prayer is the instrument the laity used to teach themselves how to pray—the primer. By revealing the ways “devout, literate, lay people” used primers, he amends the work of many earlier historians, demonstrating the importance of the print culture to the Catholic community (265). Catholics, similar to Protestants, employed printed materials to educate and to further the church’s cause. While this alone is useful, Duffy goes even further, claiming that devotional primers fostered the democratization and social homogeneity of the medieval Catholic world “in which religion was a single but multifaceted and resonant symbolic house, within which rich and poor, simple and sophisticate could kneel side by side, using the same prayers and sharing the same hopes" (298).

The final way Duffy recasts the image of medieval religion in England is his treatment of the cult of death (301). Following the lead of Johan Huzinga, he claims that the people of the late Middle Ages were obsessed with the topic of death. This preoccupation with the danse macabre helped make the doctrine of purgatory the crux of the matter for the laity. The novelty of Duffy’s analysis is how he interprets this fascination with death and purgatory, namely, “as a means of prolonging the presence of the dead within the community of the living, and therefore as the most eloquent of testimonies to the permanent value of life in the world of time and change” (303). In short, death mattered because life mattered.

In addition to his treatment of the various ways ordinary men and women lived in light of their religious convictions, Duffy also strives to correct the way earlier scholars, such as A. G. Dickens, portrayed several of England’s extraordinary leaders, specifically Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. He prefers to render Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth as revolutionaries rather than reformers. In his estimation, these despotic leaders and their subordinates attacked the dynamic, traditional piety of Catholicism. His revision does not stop there, however, as he suggests that Mary Tudor should not be seen as throwing the English church back into the arms of an unwanted, outdated Catholic faith. Instead, her creative efforts to reconstruct the church met with popular enthusiasm. While he refuses to do away with “Bloody Mary” completely, Duffy contends that Marian Catholicism was a religiously progressive program “at one with the larger Counter-Reformation” (564). The reigns of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, on the contrary, forced a radical, new religion on an unwilling community, eventually contributing to the rise of a generation “which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be the Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world” (593).

As this brief assessment of the strengths of The Stripping of the Altars makes clear, Duffy adds much to the historiography of late medieval England. His brilliant revisions of the pervasive nature of Catholicism and the Tudor rulers lead to a startlingly new image of the world of late medieval England, not to mention the religious milieu of the period. His analysis suffers, however, from his penchant to overstate the dichotomy between religious traditionalists and radicals. The notion of traditional religion, “the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people,” drives his argument (3). In the end, though, Duffy misunderstands an important quality about tradition. He fails to recognize that tradition often changes over time. His examination of this period, spanning nearly two centuries, assumes that what ordinary people thought and experienced underwent little to no change, despite the fact that this era was characterized by technological, political, economical, and ideological changes. Duffy overlooks the fact that religious convictions could have changed as well. Instead, he consistently argues that religion remained “traditional.” This conviction leads him to stress a drastic and constant distinction between traditional religion and radical religion (and the respective adherents of both). Consequently, this strict dichotomy weakens the overall feasibility of his argument. In short, the vibrant “traditional religion” of The Stripping of the Altars seems more like the author’s creation than the lived religion of late medieval English men and women.

On the whole, Duffy certainly makes important contributions to the study of the Reformation, particularly its development in England. He casts new light on the extent to which society was concerned with the religious world, which he argues was very much a Catholic world. Moreover, he dispenses several myths of the reign of Mary Tudor and of the glorious reforms of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth. His rigorous definition of tradition and “traditional religion,” however, leads to the volume’s major weakness. Duffy refuses to see any evolution in tradition. In his estimation, it appears that tradition is what it is because it does not change. This tendency to overlook the mutability of England’s given tradition causes him to overstate the dichotomy between the period’s religious traditionalists and radicals. Perhaps Duffy could learn a valuable lesson about tradition from Tevye, a fictional Jewish dairyman in 1905 Russia. As implied by the motto semper reformanda, a life without the existence of hard and fast traditions is not necessarily “as shaky as a fiddler on the roof” (Joseph Stein, Fiddler on the Roof , 9).