ABSTRACT
The image of the poor changed for the worse in 16th-century Europe. The Church was unable to deal with rising numbers of impoverished Europeans, and responsibility for the poor shifted to the emerging secular State. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s exposed the dependence of the poor on the Church. At the time of the Reformation, while the poor in their distress caused disorder, dissent and threat, the rich, including the Church, became more conspicuously rich: the extravagance of St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome could be seen not as the glory of the Church but its shame. As the 16th-century crisis of poverty unfolded amid government weakness, the poor, in breach of the biblical spirit, were blamed, in popular opinion and with the full force of the law.
