Masters Thesis

Charity, nationalism, piety, and Britishness: the problem of the emigrant French clergy

The early modern period in Britain saw a shift in the way charity was justified. The dissolution of the monasteries, the original bastions of charity, led to attempts by the British government to address the issues of poverty and vagrancy. The population increase of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the creation of philanthropic associations that endeavored to address problems the government could not or would not address. After the 1701 Act of Union and the consolidation of a collectively imagined British Identity, these philanthropic associations increasingly began to utilize nationalistic rhetoric as justifications for charitable action, superseding traditional pious justifications.

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