The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 is a work of history written by Eamon Duffy and published in 1992 by Yale University Press.

[1] In the Preface to the second edition, Duffy says, "[t]he book was thus intended as a contribution towards a reassessment of the popularity and durability of late medieval religious attitudes and perceptions..."[2] While its title suggests a focus on iconoclasm, with an allusion to the ceremony of stripping the Altar of its ornaments in preparation for Good Friday, its concerns are broader, dealing with the shift in religious sensibilities in English society between 1400 and 1580.

In particular, the book is concerned with establishing, in intricate detail, the religious beliefs and practices of English society in the century or so preceding the reign of Henry VIII.

Duffy's argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.

[3] Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.

A key point that Duffy makes, aiming to refute Jean Delumeau's contention on the matter, is that there was no substantial difference between the religious beliefs and practices of the educated classes (the clergy and the temporal elite) on the one hand and those of the wider populace on the other.

Writing in The New York Review of Books, British historian Maurice Keen stated, Perhaps it takes an Irishman to offer Englishmen (and others) a convincing picture of the religion of the ordinary lay people of England in the age before the Reformation.

...The evocation of [medieval Roman Catholicism,] that older, pre-Reformation tradition and of what its observances meant to the laity of its time is the theme of the first part of Dr. Duffy's deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated study.

In a review of the second edition, The Atlantic's literary editor, Benjamin Schwarz, called it [A] vigorous and eloquent book, a work of daring revision and a masterpiece of the historical imagination.... At once meticulous and lush, The Stripping of the Altars patiently and systematically recovers the lost world of medieval English Catholicism.