PROSTITUTING THE PULPIT? THE NEGOTIATED AUTHORITY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NEW ENGLAND CLERGY
OF DISSERTATION
Exhorting or Extorting?: George Whitefield's Financial Controversies
This thesis examines George Whitefield’s fundraising techniques and their reception by his audiences in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston between 1738 and 1770. Although historians have assumed that Whitefield’s fundraising work was inherently controversial, a close analysis of Whitefield’s own writings and the newspapers and pamphlets published in these cities reveals that this was not the case. Instead, questions about his collections began once Whitefield’s ministry as a whole became more controversial in 1741 and continued until 1746 when he published an external audit of his financial accounts. During this period, attacks on Whitefield’s finances became a potent way to discredit his ministry and the revivals he promoted. While these criticisms appeared throughout the colonies, there were significant thematic and chronological differences in the content of the debates in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Arguments over his collections reveal different understandings of how religion, charity, and the economy should relate to one another in the mid-eighteenth century.
The laws of Cnut and the history of Anglo-Saxon royal promises
The ‘first’ and ‘second’ law codes of Cnut are the last surviving codes issued in the name of an Anglo-Saxon king.They are the final fruit of the interest in kingship and law and in the inter-relationship of the two which characterized the period following the monastic revival in England and which is especially associated with the name of Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Although they are far from being complete codifications of Anglo-Saxon law, they draw extensively on earlier legislation. They are different in kind from much tenth-century law, which is usually more limited and administrative in content and character, and their nature and purpose invite further consideration.