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”.