scholarly journals Poor Relief, Welfare, and Community Building

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Smooth Transition ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Urban Networks ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Archival Work

AbstractThis review introduces the broad themes and methods of Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations and focuses on the author's portrait of actual practices of citizenship in early modern cities of Europe. It highlights the strengths of Prak's study in formidable archival work and broad comparative reading. It points out the central place of practices of poor relief to the building of urban networks of citizenship, drawing out the importance of women in participating in these informal yet critical practices of citizenship. Taking the relationship between provisioning for the poor and community building seriously, and building on Prak's view of Britain's relatively smooth transition from early modern to modern practices of citizenship, the essay speculates on whether England's unusual nationwide poor law (born in the early modern period and exemplifying ideals of citizenship usually associated with “urban republicanism”) played its own critical role in the rise of an integrated nation there.

The will to give: charitable bequests, inter vivos gifts and community building in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1800

2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELISE VAN NEDERVEEN MEERKERK
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Will ◽  
Charitable Bequests

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

Temporary Housing and Unsettled Population: Drivers of Urban Change in Early Modern Marseille and Rome

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 118-140
Author(s):  
Eleonora Canepari
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Mobile Population ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This paper argues that unsettled people, far from being “marginal” individuals, played a key role in shaping early modern cities. It does so by going beyond the traditional binary between rooted and unstable people. Specifically, the paper takes the temporary places of residence of this “unsettled” population – notably inns (garnis in France, osterie in Italy) – as a vantage point to observe social change in early modern cities. The case studies are two cities which shared a growing and highly mobile population in the early modern period: Rome and Marseille. In the first section, the paper focuses on two semi-rural neighborhoods. This is to assess the impact of mobility in shaping demographic, urbanistic, and economic patterns in these areas. Moving from the neighborhood as a whole to the individual buildings which composed it, the second section outlines the biographies of two inns: Rome’s osteria d’Acquataccio and Marseille’s hôtel des Deux mondes. In turn, this is to evaluate changes and continuities over a longer period of time.

Seroras and Local Religious Life in the Basque Country and Navarre, 1550–1769

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda L. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Basque Country ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social

In the early modern period, Basque women who could not or did not want to follow the traditional paths of monasticism or secular marriage had a third option. They could become seroras, or celibate laywomen licensed by the diocese and entrusted with caring for a shrine or parish church. Seroras enjoyed significant social prestige and their work was competitively remunerated by the local community; yet despite their central place in the local religious life of the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, the seroras have attracted almost no historical study. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it summarizes the social and spiritual context that allowed for women to experiment with the more unorthodox religious vocations like that of the seroras; and secondly, it draws from extensive primary documentation concerning the seroras in order to outline the main features of the vocation, by extension differentiating them from better-known categories of the semi-religious life such as the beguines, Castilian beatas, or Italian tertiaries.

scholarly journals “It Is Extreme Necessity That Makes Me Do This”: Some “Survival Strategies” of Pauper Households in London's West End During the Early Eighteenth Century”

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (S8) ◽  
pp. 47-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Boulton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Elderly Parents ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Alternative Sources

Although research on survival strategies is still at a relatively early stage, there are clearly some areas where there is considerable difference in emphasis placed by historians on the relative importance of particular “expedients” deployed by the poorin extremisThere is, for example, uncertainty regarding the amount of support given by neighbours as opposed to relatives. There is some historical contention, too, over the importance to the elderly of care by their children, as opposed to alternative sources of maintenance such as earnings, charity and especially the formal institutions of poor relief. After all, in the early modern period the principle source for a study of the survival strategies of poor people is always likely to be the records of poor relief or charitable agencies and institutions. The obvious danger here is that historians of poor relief consistently overestimate the importance of such relief to the poor. Both Richard Wall and Pat Thane, using evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, for example, have demonstrated that the elderly received far more support from relatives than has been realized. Professor Thane has argued that this situation is unlikely t o have been new. Other historians, however, are much more sceptical over the value of intergenerational flows of wealth from children to elderly parents.

Written Proof Between Capitulations and Ottoman Kadi Courts in the Early Modern Period

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Maurits H. van den Boogert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The West ◽  
Legal Reforms ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
Trade Partners

Abstract The introduction of legal reforms in the sixteenth century that gave the Hanafi school its central place in the Ottoman legal system coincided with the arrival of new trade partners from the West, first France and later England and the Dutch Republic. The Ottoman authorities’ own emphasis on the primacy of written proof and the marginalization of oral testimony was also reflected in the privileges granted to these new arrivals from the West. Although many European ambassadors and consuls distrusted “Turkish justice”, the Ottoman legal system’s stability and predictability contributed considerably to creating favourable conditions of trade.

Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Women’S Agency

Examining women’s agency in the past has taken on new urgency in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women’s Marches, and the global #MeToo movement. The essays in this collection consider women’s agency in the Renaissance and early modern period, an era that also saw both increasing patriarchal constraints and new forms of women’s actions and activism. They address a capacious set of questions about how women, from their teenage years through older adulthood, asserted agency through social practices, speech acts, legal disputes, writing, viewing and exchanging images, travel, and community building. Despite family and social pressures, the actions of girls and women could shape their lives and challenge male-dominated institutions. This volume includes thirteen essays by scholars from various disciplines, which analyze people, texts, objects, and images from many different parts of Europe, as well as things and people that crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The Relacyja of Sefer Muratowicz: 1601–1602 Private Royal Envoy of Sigismund III Vasa to Shah ‘Abbas I

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93
Author(s):  
Michael Połczyński
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Social Milieu ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Armenian Population

Armenian merchant and Ottoman subject Sefer Muratowicz emigrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth century. Soon after, he appeared before Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I as the personal envoy of King Sigismund III Vasa on a royal diplomatic mission unsanctioned by the Commonwealth's parliament. Though the trajectory of Sefer Muratowicz's life is not without precedence in the heterogeneous social milieu of Poland-Lithuania, his documented involvement in the private royal embassy of 1601–1602 to Safavid Persia presents an exceptional view into the critical role of the diasporic Armenian population in the diplomatic and economic relations between Europe's largest republic and the Islamic world in the early modern period.

The English Medieval Village Community and Its Decline

1994 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Dyer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Peak Period ◽  
Village Community ◽  
Peasant Society ◽  
Social And Economic Development ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Village

The village community has a shadowy existence in historical writing about the English Middle Ages. With a few honorable exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to assign to the village any central place in their account of medieval society. In some cases it is ignored or given such small emphasis as to imply that it was of little importance, and it is still necessary to provide evidence for the existence of the community and its organization.This essay is concerned first with questions of definition and locating the village community's role in society and government. Second, the problem of the community's decline will be investigated, examining the relationships between villagers, mainly in the peak period of social and economic development around 1300, and then exploring the evidence for deterioration in the unity of the village after 1350. This is intended to reexamine the subject in the light of recent work and in particular to consider the skepticism about the collective nature of peasant society. Attention will also be given to the idea that late medieval villages were as divided in their social structure and as collusive with outside authorities as were their successors in the early modern period.

Migration of the Poor

2012 ◽  
pp. 13-60
Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Admissions Policy ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

This chapter discusses the arrival in to and departure from Amsterdam of poor migrants and the underlying reasons for their movements. The early modern period saw thousands of people, Jews among them, emigrate from their home countries and travel in search of a new life. Some were forced to leave by war, persecution, or economic difficulties; others were attracted by the work made available by new state or mercantile policies. The chapter then looks at the admissions policy of the Amsterdam Portuguese community and casts light on the city's role as a transit port. The city's tolerant immigration policy carried a number of risks, the most obvious of which was that it would be burdened with a large influx of paupers. However, the city seemed undeterred by this. Nevertheless, the city did take a few preventive measures from the last decades of the sixteenth century onwards. For example, undesirable elements were banned from the city, and the authorities laid down that all immigrants must have resided in Amsterdam for a specified period before they could claim poor relief from the city or from the Reformed Charity Board. Over time, eligibility for poor relief was made conditional on increasingly long periods of residence, along with more and more stringent restrictions of other kinds.

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