Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain by Katherine Judith Anderson

Abstract

particularly extreme economic opportunity not often evident in human history. In a society where so much property was held in the “dead hand” (mortmain) of the Catholic Church—at least one-third of it by the end of the Middle Ages—what should have been the right way to redistribute it if the opportunity were to arise? The Reformation not only presented Europeans with new theological choices; it (perhaps inadvertently) also offered them the chance to restructure systems of property ownership in a truly radical way now that a plurality of all economic assets was up for grabs. Chung-Kim does not neglect to highlight the many disputes that arose between Reformed leaders and their secular princely (or urban) counterparts about how to redistribute that property. But Chung-Kim could have reflected much more deeply on the magnitude of this opportunity, the problems that it raised, and the new vistas that it opened. How much of the new economic thinking of the reformers— about poor relief, as well as about work and the household—should be attributed to the worsening conditions of the sixteenth century and how much to the shocking disruption of so much wealth at one time? More attention to the latter could have helped to flesh out more fully the titular “economics of faith.”