Monarchs, Monks, and Scholars: Religion and State Power in Early Modern England and Korea

Abstract

Religious institutions have become wealthy and influential in different societies in different times, and states have on occasion moved to seize this wealth and limit this influence through disestablishment of a religious institution’s official sanction. This presentation focuses on two cases: Chosŏn Korea and Tudor England. Both cases were state-initiated, top-down attempts to impose a large-scale religious change on a premodern society, accompanied by large-scale state seizure of monastic lands. A comparison of these two cases will illuminate both generalities and specificities of this kind of social change. In both countries, disestablishment of a state religion was justified by popular opposition to perceived corruption in monastic communities, even though both were at least partly realist measures to restore depleted state finances. Both kings who initiated the seizure of monastic lands maintained their personal faith in the very religion they were disestablishing. However, significant differences also emerge in accordance with the specific historical contexts of each case. In Korea, restoration of the old religion or the continuation of the reformation never became a succession issue as it did in England. Nor, in Korea, did Buddhism return to prominence in government affairs, though that religion continued to be important outside of the state apparatus. In England, religious issues were less a bone of contention in the struggle for power between throne and aristocracy than in Korea, where royal patronizing of Buddhism was a symbol of resistance to the overweening Confucian aristocracy. Each case illuminates aspects of the general phenomenon of religious change.