Pastoral Care, Literary Cure and Religious Dissent: Zones of Freedom in the British Atlantic (c. 1630-1720)

当今对公共健康的思考已经越来越多地关注福利和照料的形式。该项目将通过处理照料已经出现并作为一种社会实践而形成的一些背景，来促进这种思考。它的研究重点是描述和分析牧民关怀的概念，因为这一概念在1630年至1720年期间在英属大西洋两岸的三个信仰社区中得到实践。该项目将进一步评估前现代历史中的护理实践如何影响和塑造我们后世俗时代的牧民护理和整体福祉。该项目侧重于受民族国家发展影响的信仰社区，以及新兴国家如何建立特定的宗教忏悔，以此作为其身份的组成部分。它将评估这些社区及其照料做法是如何因政治排斥和/或与权力中心的地理距离而形成的。政府的政策，如1662年的《统一法案》，将拒绝遵守其要求的公民排除在国家教会之外，以及地缘政治后勤，如一个小型国家教会面临的挑战，其基础是越来越多的教区需要为生活在民族国家领土范围之外的成员提供关怀，这创造了前所未有的实验空间。无论是凭借政府的胁迫和迫害，还是由于遥远的教区监督(由于商业帝国的扩张)，这些自由区要求社区通过重新发明牧师的做法和创造提供牧民关怀的新方式来发挥主动性。这些社区保存的档案允许挖掘他们牧民护理的历史做法。该项目详细关注：1)牧养的概念--界定宗教、哲学和科学的照料形式之间的关系，并考察这种关系是如何随着时间的推移而改变的；2)牧养、情感和经验的词汇，以书信为例，评估这些词汇揭示了形成照料规定的科学、语言和神学认识论；3)牧师作为灵魂和身体的医生的作用--在前现代时期，身体和精神护理之间的界限是不稳定的，牧师为确保受照顾者的整体福祉而开出的治疗处方。这意味着专注于这些早期现代社区实践护理的物质方式，并考虑政治排斥和/或距离大都市中心的地理距离如何影响日益增长的专业专业化(例如，牧师、传教士和医生之间的专业化)。该项目植根于对最重要的社区如何在自由区进行照顾的历史分析，但也超出了这一范围。它询问观察护理和治疗之间的关系如何有助于医学作为一种新兴的专业实践的历史。它还考虑了一个历史上和神学上知情的牧民关怀概念如何在我们自己的基于证据和工具化的公共卫生背景下塑造对灵性的思考。更具体地说，它将解决当今对书面文字和阅读行为如何被润色和(与阅读疗法一样)作为护理形式或治疗药物的处方的理解。该项目还将评估这些历史社区所体现的关怀做法如何与当前关于提供援助和宗教行为者在全球公共领域中的作用的想法相吻合。与非学术组织的合作将是该项目面向公众的这些方面不可或缺的一部分。

Present-day thinking about public health has come to give increasing attention to forms of wellbeing and caregiving. This project will contribute to such thinking by addressing some of the contexts in which caregiving has emerged and has been formulated as a social practice. Its study focuses on description and analysis of the concept of pastoral care as it was practised in three communities of faith operating across the British Atlantic between 1630 and 1720. The project will further assess how practices of care in the pre-modern past both inform and can shape pastoral care and holistic wellbeing in our post-secular present. The project focuses on faith communities impacted by the development of nation states and the ways in which emergent states established a specific religious confession as integral to their identity. It will assess how these communities and their practices of care were shaped by political exclusion and/or geographical distance from centres of power. Government policy, such as the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which excluded citizens who refused to conform to its demands from participating in the state church, and geopolitical logistics, such as the challenges faced by a small national church based on parishes increasingly required to provide care for members living beyond the territorial limits of the nation state, created unprecedented spaces for experimentation. Whether by virtue of governmental coercion and persecution, or distant parochial oversight (due to an expanding commercial empire) these zones of freedom required communities to exercise initiative by reinventing practices of ministry and generating new ways of providing pastoral care. The archives preserved by these communities allow their historical practices of pastoral care to be excavated. The project gives detailed attention to: 1) the concept of pastoral care - defining relationships between religious, philosophical and scientific forms of caregiving, and examining how this changed over time; 2) vocabularies of pastoral care, emotion and experience, exemplified in letters, assessing what these reveal about the scientific, linguistic and theological epistemologies that shaped care provision; 3) the role of the pastor as a physician of soul and body - the boundary between physical and spiritual care was fluid in the pre-modern period and pastors prescribed treatment to ensure the holistic wellbeing of those under their care. This means focusing on the material ways in which these early modern communities practised care and considering how political exclusion and/or geographical distance from the metropolitan centre impacted increasing professional specialisation (e.g. between pastor, missionary and physician). The project is rooted in, but extends beyond, an historical analysis of how liminal communities exercised care in zones of freedom. It asks how observing relationships between care and cure may contribute to the history of medicine as an emerging professional practice. It also considers how an historically and theologically informed concept of pastoral care can shape thinking about spirituality in our own evidence-based and instrumentalised public health context. More particularly, it will address present-day understanding of how the written word and the act of reading are glossed and (as with bibliotherapy) prescribed as forms of care or agents of cure. The project will also evaluate how the practices of care embodied by these historical communities speak to current thinking about the provision of aid and the role of faith actors in the global public sphere. Partnership with non-academic organisations will be integral to these public-facing dimensions of the project.