Tea at Trianon: ‘The Stripping of the Altars’, 30 Years On

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, April 14, 2022

‘The Stripping of the Altars’, 30 Years On

From Eamon Dufffy at The Catholic Herald via Stephanie Mann:

Thirty years is a long shelf life for any historical work, and perhaps especially so for a historical work self-consciously designed as a challenge to received opinion. For all its bulk, The Stripping of the Altars is a polemic, written to contest the account of the English Reformation canonised in a long interpretative tradition that descended from the Elizabethan Protestant martyrologist John Foxe via the Victorian historian and celebrant of England’s Imperial destiny, James Anthony Froude, and which was still current in the 1980s, thanks mainly to the work and reputation of Professor Geoffrey Dickens whose textbook, The English Reformation, dominated school and university study of the subject. For Dickens, the patriotic product of a robustly Protestant Yorkshire childhood, the Reformation was the triumph not only of true Christianity over the “travesty” of medieval superstition, but the natural product of British common sense, and the emergence of a “lay-dominated society with its mind firmly fixed upon moderation, good sense and security in this world”.

In the early 1980s, three unrelated events converged to turn my attention decisively to the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. I was invited to give a lecture on the Book of Common Prayer Burial Service. I decided to tackle this task by comparing the elaborate medieval Latin burial service with the austerely Protestant rite Cranmer had quarried from it: the realisation that, in the medieval service at the moment of committal of the corpse, the priest addressed the dead person directly, whereas in the Prayer Book rite the minister turned instead to the living mourners round the grave and spoke about the dead only in the third person, would develop into one of the key ideas of The Stripping of the Altars.

Then, I began to explore the churches of East Anglia, and had it borne in on me that huge numbers of them had undergone extensive and costly extensions, rebuilding and refurbishment in the 15th and early 16th century, and that this remarkable surge of activity was funded largely by lay donations and bequests, a massive popular investment in the practice and beliefs of late-medieval Catholicism that had left its trace not only in a vast archive of late-medieval wills, but in the funeral brasses, carved fonts, rood screens and wall-paintings, stained glass, and family and guild chapels, which survived in such astonishing abundance in East Anglia. How could all this be squared with conventional notions of a failing church which had forfeited the confidence of the laity? (Read more.)