haqHoly shit, the travel book I'm reading is full of rubbish about the dissolution of the monasteries:
1. that was written by someone who touts their masters degree in "medieval history" (although iirc they studied "medieval" literary fiction) and
2. evidenced with an unsourced claim "Historians have noted that" [blah decontextualised blah] and
3. concludes "Almost overnight, the poor had lost one of their primary means of support", lmao. Where do we think the resources those monks were spending on "the poor" came from? Did all that gold-plating on the monks' books descend as manna from heaven? Were their enormous luxury stone homes paid for with prayer? Were their extensive land-holdings previously Terra Nullius with a mysterious absence of resident peasants? Perhaps the monks' unusually calorific diets grew miraculously on their plates without peasant farmers or taxes? Those lazy poors, eh, living off "alms" from the richest institution on earth... that stole all its resources from those same poors... who then had a tiny percentage of their own resources returned to them as "alms" from the resource-hoarding church. Or were all those hoarded resources acquired and retained by the Church using centuries of genocidal violence? I mean, even someone unwilling to check their assumptions could probably guess the answers here.
And this was after many pages of C19th originated nonsense about the Catholic Church, based in Rome, supposedly incorporating lots of Pagan English religion into Catholicism, lmao, no, that didn't happen and Catholics even wiped out rival forms of native Christianity fgs.
Gonna need churnalists who're too lazy to do basic research to stop publishing their brain farts.
#reading #books #history #EnglishHistory #Christianity #Catholicism #CatholicChurch