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

This major revisionist account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in 15th-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system.