From Reformation to Improvement Public Welfare in Early Modern England [Hardcover]

Paul Slack's incisive analysis shows how the English came to believe between 1500 and 1740 that piecemeal improvement was more likely to be achieved than total social reformation. He examines social policy and institutions such as workhouses and hospitals in order to illustrate how contemporaries tried to shape their social and moral environment, and how they defined the notion of `welfare'.

Introduction
1. The Common Weal
2. Godly Cities
3. Absolute Power
4. The Public Good
5. The Parliament's Reformation
6. Bodies Politic
7. Civil Societies
Index

...Paul Slack has produced a disturbing, as well as an exciting and important, book. --Times Literary Supplement

[An] important book...[Slack's] work enriches our sense of the nature and ends of government, and complicates our understanding of the meaning of reform, and of its constituencies. --The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Keeping in mind Slack's top-down perspective, there is a lot to admire in his one-sided discussion of the problem of poverty in early modern England...[H]e does an excellent job of connecting particular moments of diagnostic rhetoric with a larger vision of social evolution. --Albion

[A] well-argued framework for viewing the history of public welfare from 1500-1740. It ties together the detailed researches of many scholars and provides a unique synthesis. Intended for professional historians and graduate students,From Reformation to Improvementshould become the starting place for any study of public welfare in early modern England. --History

While rehearsing some of his previous research, Slack transcends it by offering a survey of public welfare policies that serious students will find a frequently stimulating guide to a perennially important and surprisingly interesting subject...It addition to its breadth, learning, and ambition, its perspective on the nature ol³½