Economics of Faith: Reforming Poor Relief in Early Modern Europe by Esther Chung-Kim

The history of religious thought has been one of the subfields of history least amenable to the insights and methodologies of the social sciences, perhaps for entirely understandable reasons. However, as Chung-Kim notes early in her study of what she calls “the economics of faith,” scholars have recently made a serious effort to broaden at least Reformation scholarship to “be more inclusive of complex social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics and their shaping of religious reform movements” (13). She suggests that the field is trying to come down from the clouds of intellectual history and become more aware of life as it is lived on the ground. To that end, this study rejects the dominant practice of “asking whether the religious reformers shaped early modern society” to acknowledge instead that the work of theologians, preachers, and organizers was informed by a broader context. Did theological ideas respond to the material...