shapeless
33.6K posts
@shapeless2000
We knew a million things we could hardly understand.
This one looks fascinating. Did intellectuals play a role, preparing Thatcher's takeover? Or was it, in fact, a counter-reaction to intellectuals' dominance in public life? I saw Dworkin in classroom, and met Isaiah Berlin in person, in Oxford, in 1987-88.
Today on which the Church commemorates the English and Welsh martyrs, I highly recommend The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy’s history of the English Reformation. It argues that traditional Catholic religion in late medieval England was vibrant, deeply popular, and thoroughly integrated into everyday life through a rich calendar of feasts, saints’ cults, pilgrimages, images, prayers for the dead, and elaborate liturgy. Far from a corrupt or decaying faith ripe for reform, this “traditional religion” commanded broad lay enthusiasm right up to the 1530s. The book then traces how Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s regimes systematically dismantled it: dissolving monasteries, banning images and shrines, rewriting or suppressing service books, closing chantries, and enforcing new Protestant doctrines and worship. Duffy shows this as a top-down cultural revolution that met significant passive and sometimes active resistance, especially in the countryside, and left ordinary people bereft of familiar rituals and communal devotions. The title refers both to the literal removal of altars and to the broader cultural “stripping” of a whole religious world.
