Cultures of Care

Cultures of Care: Domestic Welfare, Discipline and the Church of Scotland, c. 1600?1689 explores voluntary networks of charity and their interaction with the Reformed Church of Scotland. Whereas most previous histories have assessed the growth of institutional charity, this book contends that the Reformed Church of Scotland was heavily reliant on informal, domestic modes of self-help throughout the seventeenth century.

The existence and widespread acceptance of informal care dramatically changes our understanding of the impact of the Calvinist Reformation. Local ecclesiastical and secular leaders did not have a concerted policy to affect or ameliorate informal networks of care. Reformed authorities were members of these networks, as well as agents to police them, collapsing distinctions between informal and formal modes of Calvinist authority.

?The strengths of Langley?s work lie in its readability. The prose is engaging and the various specific examples allow for connection with the individuals living in the distant past. He takes a broad concept??care??and makes it more digestible.?
Charlotte Holmes, in: Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (August, 2021), pp. 287?288.



?This book provides a significant step forward in early modern Scottish social history. However it also has important implications for the history of the Reformed Kirk in demonstrating that kirk sessions did not seek to marginalise, downgrade, or control informal care.?

John McCallum, Nottingham Trent University. In: Scottish Church History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2021), pp. 171?173.

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