The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (review)
Counterreformation. It is force, and not the vapidity of the Utraquist church itself, David contends, that explains its downfall. David sees the subsequent religious history of the Czechs as scarred by the coercive substitution of their native religious institutions and identity with the post-Tridentine Roman church. In the end, he sees the Utraquist church as still an attractive model for a church that is broad-minded, respective of tradition, grounded in a common cultural identity, and immune to extremism. One senses he sees this as a live option for our own day, as well as a model for its own time. The book is certainly not beyond criticism. Some of his judgments, both in terms of vocabulary and interpretation, suffer from his desire to counteract previous historiographical slights and misjudgments and his strong attraction to Utraquist ecclesiology. An instance of this would be the use of “liberal” in the title, a term which may speak to us today, but whose utility in the understanding the sixteenth century context is unclear. Another is his intimation that Utraquism represents a superior model for the church in the sixteenth century. In some abstract sense this might be true, but it doesn’t serve as an adequate perspective from which to view the concrete cultural, social, and political conditions that modulate historical reality. To his credit, David does turn from the ideal to look at the degree to which Utraquism was a religion that was lived and not simply conceived. But any flaws of language and conception are far outweighed by the virtues of this study, which extends our knowledge of an important and interesting dimension of the historical landscape of Reformation-era Europe and which ably asserts the case for reconceiving how we view its place within this setting. PATRICK M. HAYDEN-ROY Nebraska Wesleyan University