1984, 400 years early
Feb. 9th, 2003 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySo I've gotten to the Reformation in Duffy, and the dissolution of the monasteries has started.
Traditional outrage at such sacrilege [the confiscation of saints' relics] was muted. The Treasons Act was a formidable instrument, and complaint against the King's proceedings liable to backfire on the complainer. As early as March 1534 Cromwell had made a memorandum "to have substantial persons in every good town to discover all who speak or preach" against the Henrician religious revolution, and his postbag bears eloquent testimony to the network of denunciation and reprisal which resulted.
(p. 385)
Orwell would find this horribly familiar, and I think it's a useful corrective to the attitudes discussed (not demonstrated, mind, discussed) in the comments to this post of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky's, that pre-industrial societies were somehow simpler and more benevolent, as if corruption and technology went hand in hand. Technology may make corruption easier, but it doesn't cause it. That's left to the infinite ingenuity of the human mind.
---
WORKS CITED
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Traditional outrage at such sacrilege [the confiscation of saints' relics] was muted. The Treasons Act was a formidable instrument, and complaint against the King's proceedings liable to backfire on the complainer. As early as March 1534 Cromwell had made a memorandum "to have substantial persons in every good town to discover all who speak or preach" against the Henrician religious revolution, and his postbag bears eloquent testimony to the network of denunciation and reprisal which resulted.
(p. 385)
Orwell would find this horribly familiar, and I think it's a useful corrective to the attitudes discussed (not demonstrated, mind, discussed) in the comments to this post of
papersky's, that pre-industrial societies were somehow simpler and more benevolent, as if corruption and technology went hand in hand. Technology may make corruption easier, but it doesn't cause it. That's left to the infinite ingenuity of the human mind.---
WORKS CITED
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
