"Whether ’tis lawful for a man to beat his wife": Casuistical Exercises in Late-Stuart and Early-Hanoverian England (original) (raw)

2018, Carlo Ginzburg (ed.), A Historical Approach to Casuistry: Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury)

The role of a casuist in a Protestant country was inevitably advisory. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, casuistry was generally regarded as being about ‘self-reliance,’ with each believer being expected, albeit with suitable learned guidance, to be his own casuist. The major issues were grace and the assurance of salvation (‘whether a man be a childe of God or no’). English Reformed casuistry was also largely directed at the laity, hence the prevalence of the vernacular. At the end of the seventeenth century, the casuistical tradition was revived by periodical literature, and then, in the eighteenth century, by the prose fiction which in part developed from it. Most Protestant theologians, as Keith Thomas has stressed, gradually began to place much greater emphasis on the sincerity of intention rather than on the sinfulness of following an erroneous conscience. But some religious writers, especially nonconformists like the Sandemanian minister Samuel Pike and the Independent minister Samuel Hayward, carried on trying to regulate their congregations’ conduct, urging them to come up with ‘serious cases of conscience, arising from the difficulties they met with in the course of their experience, and to conceal their names’ (curiously, the practice of submitting queries anonymously had first been encouraged by John Dunton, the founder of The Athenian Mercury, initially called The Athenian Gazette: or Casuistical Mercury). In pre-Revolutionary America, the Sandemanians’ doctrine of non-forbearance, combined with their zealous loyalty to George III, ultimately tore the sect apart. Acknowledging the contingency of religious identity involved conceding that it was legitimate to believe differently and to draw practical wisdom from case ethics.