The Social Life of the Early Modern Protestant Clergy

This study uses English and Swedish sources to illustrate the importance of clerical marriage to the success of the Reformation, and examines the social standing of the clergy through their material wealth and financial networks.

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The Social Life of the Early Modern Protestant Clergy provides unexpected new insights on the lives of the early modern English and Swedish clergy through case studies and broader surveys. Rosamunde Oates demonstrates how the first generations of clergy wives in England used hospitality to support their husbands in the process of reform. Jacqueline Eales examines the shift from the sixteenth-century debate about the legality of clerical marriage to a positive portrayal of women from English clerical families in the years 1620-1720. William Gibson challenges the view that the eighteenth-century English episcopate were rapacious, arguing that they were often careful custodians of episcopal estates. Jonas Lindstroem analyses the account books of a late eighteenth-century pastor Gustaf Berg to illustrate his economic ties with his parishioners, which ran alongside their religious and social relationships. Drawing on Swedish evidence, Beverly Tjerngren charts the decline of hospitality evident in the home of widowed pastor, Adolph Adde, in the late eighteenth-century. And Jon Stobart examines the aspirations to gentility of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Northamptonshire clergy through their domestic material culture.