Distributive Measures: Theology and Economics in the Writings of Robert Crowley

Although recent criticism has seen both a renewed attention to religious texts and a new emphasis on the relationship between cultural production and economic processes, our understanding of the relationship between religious reform and economic change in early modern England has not yet been significantly altered. A century after Max Weber linked the "worldly asceticism" of the Calvinist doctrine of vocation to the capitalist "spirit," his thesis remains the most influential account of the relationship between Protestantism and emergent capitalism. And while it is true that Weber's thesis was modified early on by R. H. Tawney's demonstration that early Protestants generally opposed the developing free market economy, the chief effect of this correction has been a tidy separation between the residual "medieval" elements in early Protestantism, which are seen to support traditional economic arrangements, and its new, more truly Protestant elements, which are still understood as greasing the wheels of the free market and the accumulation of wealth.¹ Often, as in Tawney, Protestant theology's assistance to capitalism takes an essentially negative form: the theology of grace divides the ultimate rewards of the spiritual realm from success in the realm of works and markets, creating an ethical vacuum that, over time, is filled by the new economic values. In this way the combined influence of Weber and Tawney has prevented much serious consideration of the possibility that Protestant theology itself, and in particular the core doctrine of justification by faith, may actively oppose at least some economic models of thought.²

This presents a problem when we come to a figure like the Edwardian "gospeller" Robert Crowley, whose five books of original poetry were part of the explosion of printing during Edward VI's reign.³ Poet, publisher, bookseller, editor, translator, and Protestant clergyman, Crowley was both a radical Protestant and a vigorous economic pamphleteer, two facts that from his perspective would have seemed inseparable. Nevertheless, criticism both old and new has tended to concentrate on either his religious or his economic activity. In religion M. M. Knappen's identification of Crowley as a Tudor Puritan has been revisited by such critics as John King and David Norbrook, who see Crowley as an important practitioner of a Reformed, prophetic poetry.⁴ In economics Andrew McRae's fine study of sixteenth-century agrarian literature, God Speed the Plough, carries on the work of J. W. Allen and of Tawney himself, who long ago recognized Crowley as a significant commentator on the mid-Tudor economic crisis.⁵ For none of these writers does Crowley's radical theology bear a positive relationship to his economic position.

Only quite recently have we begun to rethink the complex relationship between the new economics and the new religion—and in particular the early Protestant hostility to economic paradigms—in ways that might affect our reading of the popular mid-Tudor reforming texts of which Crowley furnishes the outstanding examples. Peter Stallybrass, for example, suggests that a Protestant hunger for pure spirituality resulted in a desire to expose "the economic underbelly of belief," finding it "shocking that beliefs and creeds should be the same as an economic credit system."⁶ More suggestive still is Natalie Zemon Davis's work in The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. Focusing on the construction of obligation and gratitude through practices of gift giving, Davis contrasts a mode of "'Catholic' reciprocity," based on the circular exchange of gifts, with a "'Reformed' gratuitousness," based on "a spirit of the gift that wants to move through time, through history, never reversing its direction."⁷ Each mode of giving, she argues, affected a range of practices from communion to ecclesiastical employment to welfare. Though Davis's model for Catholic worship is a form of gift exchange rather than the market, from a Protestant perspective this makes little difference: gift exchange and the traditional market share a common basis in reciprocal exchange, which the Reformers believed was inconsistent with spiritual values. Further, Davis suggests that "the frequent slippage of customary gifts into required payments" left the Catholic Church vulnerable to Protestant charges "that priests were...