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

Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars is a landmark scholarly history arguing, against an older Protestant-inflected historiography, that late medieval English Catholicism was a vibrant, popularly embraced religious culture rather than a corrupt system ripe for reform, and that the Reformation was experienced by most parishioners as an imposed disruption rather than a welcomed liberation. Duffy's authority rests on exceptionally close archival work with parish records, wills and churchwardens' accounts. The book reshaped English Reformation historiography and remains highly influential, though its revisionist framing has itself drawn subsequent scholarly debate over how uniformly its findings about lay piety and reception apply across different regions and social classes of pre-Reformation England, a live conversation Duffy's own work helped initiate.