Piety And Poverty

Drawing on moving personal accounts--letters, oral histories, and memoirs--as well as original documentary evidence found in parish records, histories, and demographic data, Hugh McLeod explores the role of religion in the everyday life of working-class communities. The book reveals how belief and unbelief are related to the experiences of poverty, social class and alienation, to the ways in which people celebrated rites of passage and survived personal crises, to relationships between men and women, and to political organizations. McLeod examines the link between secularisation and the growth of cities as centres of working-class life, and chronicles how new forms of religiosity arose alongside secular political movements and remained a force among the poor even as institutional attachments diminished. Another important contribution is the book's discussion of the gendering of religious experience.

This is a study of a single community in early modern England. The authors examine the interaction of demographic, economic, social, administrative and cultural change on the villagers of Terling between 1525 and 1700.

Are secular aims, politics, and sensibilities impossible, undesirable and impracticable for Muslims and Islamic states? Should Muslim women be exempted from feminist attempts at liberation from patriarchy and its various expressions under Islamic laws and customs? Considerable literature on the entanglements of Islam and secularism has been produced in the post-9/11 decade and a large proportion of it deals with the Woman Question. Many commentators critique the secular and Western feminism, and the racialising backlash that accompanied the occupation of Muslim countries during the War on Terror military campaign launched by the U.S. government after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Implicit in many of these critical works is the suggestion that it is Western secular feminism that is the motivating driver and permanent collaborator -- along with other feminists, secularists and human rights activists in Muslim countries -- that sustains the Wests actual and metaphorical war on Islam and Muslims. The book addresses this post-9/11 critical trope and its implications for womens movements in Muslim contexts. The relevance of secular feminist activism is illustrated with reference to some of the nation-wide, working-class womens movements that have surged throughout Pakistan under religious militancy: polio vaccinators, health workers, politicians, peasants and artists have been directly targeted, even assassinated, for their service and commitment to liberal ideals. Afiya Zia contends that Muslim womens piety is no threat against the dominant political patriarchy, but their secular autonomy promises transformative changes for the population at large, and thereby effectively challenges Muslim male dominance. This book is essential reading for those interested in understanding the limits of Muslim womens piety and the potential in their pursuit for secular autonomy and liberal freedoms.

Examines the complex relationships between religion, society and charity in private and public life in Florence - Development of confraternities.

This book examines, in greater depth than the existing literature, the history of Islamic economic thought. It seeks to introduce Islamic views to debates surrounding critical economic concepts, such as scarcity, wealth, poverty, charity, usury, self-interest, rationality, and markets. It does so through a comparative analysis with the views of Judaic, Christian, and secular economic thought. “Prophecy” is meant to signify the theoretical dimension of religion, while “piety” represents its practical element; neither part is feasible without the other. Together, prophecy and piety inform the Islamic view of economic concepts and phenomena. This view seeks to adjust our approach to profits, both in this world and the next, and seeks to reexamine what is truly profitable and worthy of sacrifice.

The degree to which the English Protestant Reformation was a reflection of genuine popular piety as opposed to a political necessity imposed by the country's rulers has been a source of lively historical debate in recent years. Whilst numerous arguments and documentary sources have been marshalled to explain how this most fundamental restructuring of English society came about, most historians have tended to divide the sixteenth century into pre and post-Reformation halves, reinforcing the inclination to view the Reformation as a watershed between two intellectually and culturally opposed periods. In contrast, this study takes a longer and more integrated approach. Through the prism of charity and lay piety, as expressed in the wills and testaments taken from selected London parishes, it charts the shifting religious ideas about salvation and the nature and causes of poverty in early modern London and England across a hundred and twenty year period. Studying the evolution of lay piety through the long stretch of the period 1500 to 1620, Claire Schen unites pre-Reformation England with that which followed, helping us understand how 'Reformations' or a 'Long Reformation' happened in London. Through the close study of wills and testaments she offers a convincing cultural and social history of sixteenth century Londoners and their responses to religious innovations and changing community policy.