Abstract
The concept of sufficiency—what it meant to have enough—was fundamentally a religious category in early modern England, debated through a series of scriptural passages, notably the petition in the Lord’s Prayer for daily bread. In the era of the Reformation, Protestant writers interpreted these passages to require the equitable redistribution of wealth so that everyone might have enough. In the increasingly capitalist context of Elizabethan and Stuart England, however, these passages were reinterpreted to authorise private wealth, culminating in the work of John Locke, for whom the accumulation of riches represented sufficiency rather than excess because money, unlike bread, does not spoil. This article thus traces the process by which the Christian ethics of sufficiency ceased to provide a theoretical constraint upon capitalism.
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All biblical citations are from the KJV. In this case, the evolution of English translations is informative. In the fourteenth century, following the Vulgate, Wyclif rendered the text, ‘Give thou not to me beggary or riches; give thou only necessaries to my livelihood’. The Coverdale Bible of 1537 abandoned ‘beggary’ but followed Wyclif on the second half of the passage: ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches, only grant me a necessary living’. The replacement of necessity by convenience, first in the margin of the 1568 Bishop’s Bible and then in the text of the 1599 revision of the Geneva Bible and the 1611 KJV, may itself be a marker of the changing attitudes described in this essay.
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On Norden’s surveying career and its relationship to his religious writing, see ODNB.
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There were also at least three London editions.
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This book was published posthumously; Downame died in 1634.
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Shagan, E.H. (2019). Daily Bread: Ideas of Sufficiency in Early Modern England. In: Ingleby, M., Randalls, S. (eds) Just Enough. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56210-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56210-4_4
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