Martin Luther's father was a miner, wasn't he?
--- On Tue, 4/21/09, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] papal logic
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 11:24 PM
> You're quite right that clerical
> office couldn't be inherited. That was the church's
> way out of the family and pseudo-family alliances that were
> the basis of feudal polity. But that didn't mean that
> clerical office necessarily went to the
> aristocracy. Quite the contrary -- it was the route
> for men (and even women) of talent to rise, throughout the
> Middle Ages. Thomas Becket (whose father was a cloth
> merchant) and Thomas Wolsey (whose father was a butcher) are
> well-known English examples.
>
> And in fact it was the monasteries, not the episcopate,
> that were the major landowners (as, e.g., Henry VIII's
> button-man, Thomas Cromwell, well understood).
>
> Eliding the Reformation and the Great Revolution is at best
> a bit Whiggish, but in fact the Reformation was inter alia a
> feudal movement. The new absolutist states of the 16th
> century -- state feudalisms, as Perry Anderson explains in
> "Lineages of the Absolutist State" (!974) -- seized control
> of the church apparatus throughout Europe. That's why
> areas where the state already controlled the church ca. 1500
> (e.g. France) remained Catholic, while areas where it didn't
> (e.g. England) became Protestant. --CGE
>
>