The Organization of Welfare

2012 ◽  
pp. 77-135
Author(s):  
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Charitable Activities

This chapter examines the organization of poor relief along both centrally controlled and private lines and identifies what cultural patterns were reflected in the structure of Portuguese welfare provision. Centralization of poor relief, a fairly new phenomenon in early modern Europe, helped to co-ordinate the various charitable activities, optimizing the care of the poor and keeping it under control. The Amsterdam Portuguese Jews, being integrated European citizens, were aware of these ideas and tried to adapt them to their own environment. They were also influenced by spiritual and religious currents in Jewish thinking. They banded together in societies that, in addition to studying, tried to atone and repent for sins with charitable work. Ultimately, they evinced a highly developed notion of expiation that not only sprang from tendencies within Judaism but also reflected the Catholic background of the former New Christians.

“Constructing the Poor in Early Seventeenth-Century London”1

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 450-463
Author(s):  
Claire S. Schen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Demographic Pressure ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Undeserving Poor

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe

1976 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 15-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Pullan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Good Works ◽  
Immortal Soul ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Good Order ◽  
The Church

A quiet revolution has occurred of late in the history of poor people and poor relief in early modern Europe. Shapeless, decentralized and infinite, like the story of most everyday things, it has depended for progress on the laborious accumulation of local examples, garnered from patchy, weedy and erratically surviving evidence; and for vitality on cerebration which outstrips research, on hypo-theses which demand to be tested in a hundred detailed trials. Time was when sociologists and students of social legislation encouraged historians to believe that with the Reformation there developed fundamental differences in the ways in which the old and the new faiths treated their poor–variances which sprang essentially from the abandonment in the wake of Luther of the ancient belief that ‘good works’ (almsgiving included) offered to those who performed them a direct means of securing salvation. To compress is often to parody. But it can perhaps be said that the coming of Protestantism, in all its forms, was believed to have emancipated poor-relief from the control of a too-indulgent Church, which encouraged the almsgiver to think only of the benefit to his own immortal soul. In so doing the Church had allegedly destroyed all incentive to contrive a rational philanthropy—to build systems which would benefit the receiver of alms, which would serve the common weal, which would in general be directed at procuring good order and reducing physical want and suffering. Hence the Church was credited with a very low capacity for organization and even accused of breeding the very poor whom it relieved, by depriving them of all incentive to find employment and attain self-support.

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