The Thirteenth-Century Visitation Records of the Diocese of Hereford
When visitation of the laity became a regular feature of parish and diocesan life towards the end of the thirteenth century, it relied upon new forms of documentation. Three visitation records of the late thirteenth century from Hereford diocese are edited here, and the character of the documents, produced under the pioneering bishops Thomas Cantilupe and Richard Swinfield, is described and analysed. The authors discuss the reasons for the emergence of regular episcopal visitation around this time, and the nature and utility of the documents which it generated and on which its viability depended.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/551/737?rss=1
Currency, Conversation, and Control: Political Discourse and the Coinage in Mid-Tudor England
In 1542, Henry VIII authorised the first of a series of debasements of the English silver coinage which would collectively come to be known as the ‘great debasement’ of the mid-sixteenth century. The debasement was accompanied by a period of inflation and political change, and for contemporary observers these phenomena were inextricably linked. The coinage became the subject of a growing critical discourse, and governors feared that popular discontent threatened to spill over into riot and disorder—and perhaps even the subversion of the commonwealth. Moving away from the details of mint policy and quantitative assessments of the circulating medium that have previously occupied historians, this article explores the coinage as a topic of political discourse in the mid-Tudor period. As a matter of state, the coinage was a topic on which ordinary subjects were supposed to be silent and even Crown agents had to be circumspect, as criticising the coinage could be classed as sedition and mishandling it was a treasonous offence. But because of its status as common currency, the coinage was always in the public sphere, and was subject to the vagaries of popular opinion. This article recovers a range of contemporary perceptions and discussions of the coinage, from royal proclamations, government documents, and formal treatises, to correspondence, diary entries, court cases, and rumours. In so doing, it shows that the Crown’s efforts to control the coinage were consonant with its attempts to control political discourse and the discussion of matters of state in the mid-sixteenth century.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/551/763?rss=1
R.H. Tawney and Christian Social Teaching: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Reconsidered
The historian and socialist R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was one of the most influential works of non-fiction to be written in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Fusing historical, religious and social thought, it is the central work of Tawney’s oeuvre, but commentary upon it has focused narrowly on its historiographical significance. When attention is paid to the text and its context, it becomes clear that it arose from Tawney’s project of renewing Christian teaching on economic and social conduct. Crucial to the recovery of Tawney’s purposes here is his contribution to a Church of England report on Christianity and Industrial Problems (1918), a key text in the growth of socialism in the established church in the inter-war years. This article draws on the hitherto unused papers of the committee behind this report to demonstrate for the first time that Tawney was its main author; and it reveals that this was the first place in which he set out the ideas which would become Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. These discoveries force us to reassess Tawney’s early political thought, especially The Acquisitive Society (1921), and to conclude that Tawney as a thinker was not merely an ‘ethical socialist’, but a thinker profoundly indebted to a tradition of austere, Anglo-Catholic socialism associated especially with the theologian Charles Gore. This also revises our view of Tawney’s conception of capitalism, showing that he saw ‘usury’ as pivotal to its historical ascent.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/551/793?rss=1
Currents of Neo-Liberalism: British Political Ideologies and the New Right, c.1955-1979
This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relationship with each of the three main British political ideologies. The article distinguishes between different currents of neo-liberalism that have been absorbed into British political thought, and shows that this process to some extent pre-dated the electoral success of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The article further suggests that labelling recent British political discourse as unvarnished ‘neo-liberalism’, while at times analytically useful, simplifies a more complicated picture, in which distinctively neo-liberal ideas have been blended in different ways into the ideologies of British Liberalism, Conservatism and even Labour socialism. The article therefore turns the spotlight on a more obscure aspect of the making of British neo-liberalism by exploring how politicians and intellectuals of varying partisan stripes generated policy discourses that presented neo-liberal ideas as an authentic expression of their own ideological traditions. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this article, then, is that neo-liberalism, although frequently characterised as rigid and dogmatic, has in fact proved itself to be a flexible and adaptable body of ideas, capable of colonising territory right across the political spectrum.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/131/551/823?rss=1