Broken Promises and the Rise of a Stereotype

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Political History ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Balance Of Trade

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.

Anabaptist Sixteenth-Century Baptism as Exponent of Christian Spirituality in a Time of Cultural, Social, and Political Breaches

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 111-127
Author(s):  
Olof H. de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
European History ◽  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Religious Representative

The Reformation was the religious representative of an encompassing breach in European history. In this transition Anabaptism combats infant baptism as being a symbol of the social-religious unity of the corpus christianum that was passing by. Hence it introduces believer’s baptism as being a major symbol of a new epoch, of which persecution by church and state was the sad and existential consequence. Baptism of itself pertains to a sacrament of transition from old to new, achieved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Revisionism, the Reformation and the History of English Catholicism

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Haigh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.

Pastoral Care and the Reformation in Germany

1991 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 77-97
Author(s):  
R. W. Scribner
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Empty Shell ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Parish Clergy ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Church

Of the numerous criticisms and expressions of grievance directed at the Church in Germany on the eve of the Reformation, the most devastating was the charge of inadequate pastoral care. Reformers of all complexions bewailed the poor state of the parish clergy and the inadequate manner in which they provided for the spiritual needs of their flocks. At the very least, the parish clergy were ill-educated and ill-prepared for their pastoral tasks; at the very worst, they exploited those to whom they should have ministered, charging for their services, treating layfolk as merely a means of increasing their incomes, and, above all, resorting to the tyranny of the spiritual ban to uphold their position. The popular propaganda of the early Reformation fully exploited such deficiencies, exposing the decay in root and branch of a system of pastoral care depicted as no more than an empty shell, a facade of a genuine Christian cure of souls. The attack on the traditional Church was highly successful, successful enough to provoke an ecclesiastical revolution, and almost a socio-political revolution as well. It was, indeed, so successful that generations of historians of the Reformation have seen the condition of the pre-Reformation Church largely through the eyes of its critics and opponents. This negative image was matched by an idealized view of what succeeded it: where the old Church had failed the Christian laity, indeed, so much that they had virtually fallen into the hands of the Devil, the new Church offered solutions, a new way forward, a new standard of pastoral care and concern that created a new ideal, the Lutheran pastor, who cared for his flock as a kindly father, a shepherd who would willingly give up his life for his sheep.

Some Comments on Later Casuistry and ‘Jesuitical’ Equivocation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Corran
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter discusses early modern controversies about equivocation and mental reservation in the light of medieval intellectual history. Sixteenth-century polemics on equivocation are best explained in terms of the social and intellectual developments of that period, rather than anything inherent to the medieval discussion. The Reformation, the wars of religion in the sixteenth century, the persecution of religious minorities created an urgent new need for casuistry among Catholics who found themselves endangered. In addition the Second Scholasticism sought to make pastoral teaching relevant to political leaders of their period. Nevertheless, the combination of a stable framework of casuistical questions and changing content of moral theology that emerged in the later Middle Ages is crucial for understanding its subsequent history. The framework of ideas that were established during the medieval period was a crucial limiting factor to the later quarrels about justified equivocation.

Causes and Cures of Welfare: New Evidence on the Social Psychology of the Poor

1984 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 319
Author(s):  
Ronald L. Cohen ◽  
Leonard Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Evidence

A. G. Dickens as a Yorkshire historian

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (195) ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Claire Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Local Context ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
International History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

AbstractFor thirty years after graduating from Oxford in 1932 Dickens, a devoted Yorkshireman, produced a stream of articles on the intellectual, social and political history of the county in the sixteenth century, which culminated in 1959 in his pioneering work Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–58. After leaving Hull for London in 1962 he never found a county in the south of England to replace Yorkshire in his affections, and moved from the history of the Reformation in its local context to concentrate upon the national and international history of religion in the early modern period.

THE IDEOLOGY OF CHARITY, THE IMAGE OF THE ENGLISH POOR LAW, AND DEBATES OVER THE RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE IN FRANCE, 1830–1905

1997 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 997-1032 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY B. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Assistance ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Social Question ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
Public Relations Campaign

In France during the period 1830–1905, the very boundaries of the debate on the social question were dictated by a foreign example, the English Poor Law. French fears of national public assistance programmes were grounded in a widespread disdain for the Poor Law. In this article I examine many of the major French works on charity and assistance written between the 1830s and 1900s and the debates surrounding reform proposals. I argue that the opponents of compulsory, tax-financed public assistance created a negative image of the English Poor Law in order to discredit attempts to introduce, first, the ‘right to assistance’ in 1848–1851, and later, bills providing for free medical assistance for the poor and aid to the elderly indigent in the 1890s and 1900s. I conclude with a discussion of how the proponents of mandatory, national assistance programmes defeated a carefully orchestrated and misleading public relations campaign led by some of the opponents of social welfare during the 1890s and 1900s.

“There Should Be No Beggars Among Christians”: Karlstadt, Luther, and the Origins of Protestant Poor Relief

1977 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carter Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The People ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Needy

Thesis forty-three of theNinety-five Thesesreads, “Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better deed than he who buys indulgences.” Following the historical convention of dating the Reformation from theNinety-five Thesesof 1517, we may argue that from its inception theology and social ethics were inseparable. One particular aspect of the Reformation impact on social change which has attracted attention and controversy from the sixteenth century to the present is welfare reform. While it would be overbold to claim that reform of poor relief was motivated by theology alone, radical theological change was certainly a major factor. Since righteousnesscoram Deowas thought to be by grace alone, it became difficult to rationalize the plight of the poor as a peculiar form of blessedness. Thus Luther excoriated the indulgence sellers who robbed the people of needed resources. What was implicit in theNinety-five Thesesbecame increasingly explicit in the months and years leading up to the publication on January 24, 1522 of the Wittenberg Order.

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