442 | CONSTANCE H. BERMAN century Fountains account have pushed the date of the introduc- tion of Clarevallians into Yorkshire to the 1140s rather than the . Bernard’s letters aside, we must certainly ask whether the Yorkshire houses can really be considered a colonization from , or whether the adoption of the practices of the Burgundian house of Clairvaux was sought by Yorkshiremen who sent representatives to Burgundy. The William who served as scribe for Bernard’s Letter One was a Yorkshireman who was sent back to Yorkshire as the leader and ªrst of Rievaulx. Such was also the case for both Richard, later abbot of Fountains, and Murdac, abbot of Fountains and archbishop of York. All three had left Yorkshire to enter Clairvaux. Given that it was also a succession from Saint-Mary’s-York, can Fountains be considered a real colonization? The same questions might be asked about Selby and Saint-Germain d’Auxerre. I would ask whether monastic reform really came to eleventh- or twelfth-century Britain from the continent? If so, this movement would reverse an earlier pattern of Anglo-Saxon times, in which northern Britain was the source of monastic reform for the continent and not the recipient. Or did those locally interested in mo- nastic reform go to Burgundy and bring back new ideas? Finally, I would contend, although it may well be that Yorkshire was an especially early outpost of the monasticism of Burgundy as learned as Clairvaux, it is necessary to distinguish between a Clarevallian and a more strictly Cistercian reform. This is a ªne study that makes the case for looking beyond bound- aries of religious orders to study all religious men and women within a single region. It is the great strength of this work that its evidentiary base is so well presented that one can push its interpretations. It is to be hoped that Burton, who has recently moved to an academic position in Wales, will now turn her excellent eye for documentation and careful historian’s training to some of the vexed issues of monastic history in that part of Britain as well. Constance H. Berman University of Iowa

From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern . By Paul Slack (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 179 pp. $45.00 Early modern England gave birth to some spectacular designs for a re- formed mankind, from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the attempt to remodel Dorchester’s inhabitants after the devastating, and chasten- ing, ªre in 1613. But the moral pendulum soon swung the other way; the most evocative texts of the early eighteenth century are surely Ber- nard Mandeville’s hymn to laisser-faire, The Fable of the Bees (1714), and Daniel Defoe’s excoriations of organized hypocrisy—for example, in

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2001.31.3.442 by guest on 29 September 2021 REVIEWS | 443 Reformation of Manners (1702) and Giving Alms, No Charity (1704). That arc forms the subject of Slack’s important book. Delivered as the 1995 Ford Lectures at the University of Oxford, Slack’s study of what he calls the discourse of reform, or attitudes to so- cial reform and regulation, covers most imaginable bases in its short space. The only major omission seems to be gender; local studies of re- cipients of relief suggest another important avenue of inquiry. Never- theless, his work enriches our sense of the nature and ends of government, and complicates our understanding of the meaning of re- form, and of its constituencies. The book’s narrative frame locates the major shifts in emphasis, as men of inºuence at the center and in the localities wrestled with the ºaws of the world around them. Towns provide much of the focus, and not simply because of Slack’s own distinguished record as an urban his- torian; demographic and economic pressures meant that much of the story of reform could be written across an urban landscape. Late-medi- eval towns badged beggars and swept the streets, and when the Refor- mation displaced the religious orders that had run the hospitals, town corporations often took over endowments and inmates alike. The grow- ing concentration of godly pastors in towns that were already engaged in piecemeal reform and regulation soon gave reformation a new meaning. As the zealous strove to obliterate sin in Coventry, in Hull, and in Dorchester, godliness became for many the mark of the truly deserving poor for whom almshouses and pensions were to be provided. Slack enters less traveled ground when he ponders the relationship of social regulation to state formation and to economic development. Pointing to the continental parallels, he notes that while the early Stuart Crown may not have had the energy and incentive, it certainly pos- sessed the vocabulary—in the language of “absolute power” and “public good”—to legitimate new departures. Indeed, Slack throws valuable light on the prerogative by exploring the royal claim—however unsub- stantiated—to transcend obstructionism and particularism in a time of stress. The idea of the public good proved to have greater potential than assertions of absolute power. The Crown justiªed a raft of more or less dubious revenue-raising projects by reference to it, but the rhetoric bur- geoned with revolution. Crucial was the circle surrounding Samuel Hartlib, a German refugee, which put together disparate interests in ag- ricultural and industrial improvements, the long-standing concern to keep the poor in work, and a new awareness of state power. The quin- tessential product of this moment was the Corporation of the Poor, established in 1647. Although the corporations of the poor, the forerunners of the workhouse movement, came of age in revolution, they were hardly a partisan endeavor. Indeed, Slack highlights the approval voiced by one reformer in 1649, of all years, for Charles I’s attempts to “put life” into the poor laws (77). The next surge of applied moralism—the Reforma-

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh.2001.31.3.442 by guest on 29 September 2021 444 | DEREK HIRST tion of Manners campaign, triggered brieºy by the Revolution of 1688—proves no more susceptible to easy partisan analysis. Slack deftly charts the crosscurrents of partisanship and idealism as they rippled through town halls and workhouses, as well as Westminster. If reform was not partisan, no more was it state-initiated. Slack uncovers a pre- dictable mix of local and parliamentary agendas. Equally predictable were the ensuing workhouses and other initiatives that amounted to, at best, a piecemeal program of economic improvement. As Defoe com- plained, many became bastions of oligarchy. The important new departure in the eighteenth-century phase of the movement, Slack shows convincingly, was the growing prominence of hospitals and attempts at hygiene, rather than any major coupling of relief and regulation with economic advance. In this area, he misses a chance to broaden the economic context by including research on atti- tudes to labor. But we are left in no doubt that hopes for the inculcation of new habits in a captive and productive labor force in the workhouses were as insubstantial as all the moralizing attempts at behavioral modiªcation, whether at the turn or at the end of the seventeenth cen- tury. The outcome provided the measure of the emerging British state. While public provision, in selective fashion, for the unfortunate had be- come generally accepted, the framework in which it was to take place— one that was to endure into the twentieth century—became one of vol- untary societies regulated intermittently by a parliamentary watchdog. The general success of that comfortable arrangement, Slack contends, al- lowed the imperial state to project its energies in other directions. Derek Hirst Washington University

The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. By Eliga H. Gould (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 262 pp. $49.95 cloth $18.95 paper “The Age of the American Revolution,” as considered in this book, spanned the half century between 1740 and 1790; the “British political culture” belonged to what Gould takes to be a persistent majority de- voted to “sedentary patriotism.” It would be tempting to describe it as a silent majority, were it not for the fact that in its own time, it generated tracts and pamphlets in such numbers that Gould’s “selective list” of them takes over thirty pages of his book’s bibliography. (His industry in searching them out and then reading them is remarkable.) Yet, this cul- ture of “sedentary patriotism,” Gould contends, has been relatively silent in historical scholarship, not least in works written during the late twen- tieth century.

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