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

当今对公共卫生的思考越来越多地关注福利和护理的形式。该项目将通过解决看护已经出现并已被制定为一种社会实践的一些背景来促进这种思考。它的研究重点是描述和分析教牧关怀的概念，因为它在1630年至1720年期间在横跨英属大西洋的三个信仰社区中实践。该项目将进一步评估前现代过去的护理实践如何在我们的后世俗现在告知和塑造教牧关怀和整体福祉。该项目侧重于受民族国家发展影响的信仰社区，以及新兴国家建立特定宗教忏悔作为其身份不可或缺的方式。它将评估这些社区及其护理实践如何受到政治排斥和/或远离权力中心的地理位置的影响。政府的政策，如1662年的《统一法案》（Act of Uniformity），将拒绝符合其要求的公民排除在国家教会之外；地缘政治的后勤保障，如一个以教区为基础的小型国家教会所面临的挑战，越来越多地要求为居住在民族国家领土范围之外的成员提供照顾，为实验创造了前所未有的空间。无论是由于政府的强制和迫害，还是由于遥远的教区监督（由于商业帝国的扩张），这些自由区域需要社区通过重新发明事工实践和创造提供教牧关怀的新方法来发挥主动性。这些社区保存的档案使他们的牧灵关怀的历史实践得以挖掘。该项目详细关注：1)教牧关怀的概念——定义宗教、哲学和科学形式的关怀之间的关系，并研究这种关系如何随着时间的推移而变化；2)教牧关怀、情感和经验的词汇，以书信为例，评估这些词汇对塑造关怀提供的科学、语言和神学认识论的启示；3)牧师作为灵魂和身体医生的角色——在前现代时期，身体和精神护理之间的界限是不确定的，牧师规定治疗以确保他们所照顾的人的整体健康。这意味着关注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/或与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）。该项目根植于，但超越了，对有限社区如何在自由区域行使护理的历史分析。它询问如何观察护理和治疗之间的关系可能有助于医学史作为一个新兴的专业实践。它还考虑了历史和神学上的教牧关怀概念如何在我们自己的循证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是如何被粉饰的理解，以及（与阅读疗法一样）作为护理形式或治疗手段的规定。该项目还将评估这些历史社区所体现的护理实践如何与当前关于提供援助和信仰行为者在全球公共领域中的作用的思考相关联。与非学术组织的合作将是项目面向公众的组成部分。

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.