Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Monographs

Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany

By Anthony J. La Vopa (NHC Fellow, 1983–84; 1998–99)

Students; Social Mobility; Eighteenth-Century

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988

From the publisher’s description:

This book focuses on "poor students", young men in eighteenth-century Germany who owed their studies to charity, who formed a substantial minority within the theology faculties, and who entered careers in the clergy, the academic schools, and the universities. Professor La Vopa shows how a cluster of familiar eighteenth-century ideas about grace, talent, and merit shaped a formative social experience central to the lives of many celebrated intellectuals as well as many of the elite.

Subjects
History / Education Studies / Students / Social Mobility / Eighteenth-Century /

La Vopa, Anthony J. (NHC Fellow, 1983–84; 1998–99). Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.