Altars Restored : The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700

Abstract

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, and during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16thc because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Cathoplic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide protestants following their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, altars gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments, over a 150-year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of alterations imposed from above, the laity are revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, whether as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents - a division later translated into competing protestant views. Altars Restored integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws from hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, as well as exploring the wealth of local parish records - especially churchwardens' accounts. The result is a richly textured study of religious change at both local and national level.

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