Cultures of Charity

Nicholas Terpstra

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674071742
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Renaissance Italians pioneered radical changes in ways of helping the poor, including orphanages, workhouses, pawnshops, and women's shelters. Nicholas Terpstra shows that gender was the key factor driving innovation. Most of the recipients of charity were women. The most creative new plans focused on features of women's poverty like illegitimate births, hunger, unemployment, and domestic violence. Signal features of the reforms, from forced labor to new instruments of saving and lending, were devised specifically to help young women get a start in life. Cultures of Charity is the first book to see women's poverty as the key factor driving changes to poor relief. These changes generated intense political debates as proponents of republican democracy challenged more elitist and authoritarian forms of government emerging at the time. Should taxes fund poor relief? Could forced labor help build local industry? Focusing on Bologna, Terpstra looks at how these fights around politics and gender generated pioneering forms of poor relief, including early examples of maternity benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and credit union savings plans.

CHAPTER 1

Showing the Poor a Good Time

Gender, Class, and Charitable Cultures

In a moment of frustration, the male officers running Bologna’s pioneering welfare service, called the Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti (OPM), gave a firm and semipublic slap on the wrist to their female colleagues. The female officers (called “prioresses”) were spending a lot of money on finery, festivity, and feasting, for themselves, for the poorhouse staff, and for the poor themselves. The men asked them to stop so that the money could be better spent giving basic food and clothing to those in the OPM’s main hostel for the poor. Their demand came in a set of “Orders and Provisions for the Lady Prioresses of the Pious Charitable Agency for the Beggars” (Ordini e Provisione Perle Signore Priore sopra l’Opera pia de’Mendicanti). These were printed like the broadsheet bandi, or proclamations, that city officials plastered across the city whenever they wanted to warn of plague, announce new regulations on food safety or crime, or proclaim a holiday.¹ We don’t know if these “Orders and Provisions” were ever posted publicly like other proclamations. No date appears on the small poster, but details about the text and the history of Bologna generally allow us to narrow down the years when the officers may have issued it.

The poster highlights the different ways that early modern people thought about the poor and what they needed. We can get the firmest grip on some of the values and paradoxes that shaped the reform of poor relief by starting our investigation with a microhistorical look at this poster and questions around when and whether it was posted. Brief as it is, this printed set of “Orders and Provisions” broadcasts some of the underlying tensions about festivity, gender, and class in the governance of the poor that simmered across Europe in the sixteenth century. It highlights two different emphases or approaches to charity that we can see in many cities. One aimed to organize forms of practical assistance like work, education, food supplements, or temporary shelter in such a way that the poor could help themselves and ideally develop the resources that would help them find their way out of poverty. The other emphasized the duty of the rich to act as patrons whose selfless generosity in meeting the needs of the poor would mirror the generosity of saints and of Christ himself to believers. We can distinguish “practical” from “patronal” charity, but they were not deeply opposing values quite so much as two distinct approaches to, or cultures around, charity. As we will see below, they reflected the traditional Catholic values of misericordia and caritas respectively. Yet they were distinct enough that tensions could emerge between those who favored one or the other as the best means of helping institutionally those who lived in poverty.

Most people lived in poverty at some point in their lives, and sometimes their whole lives long. Most of the poor were working poor. Most were also women. Their poverty had as much to do with their own stage of life—whether as young mothers struggling to feed children or as old widows struggling to keep fed themselves—as with broader economic movements and with the periodic booms and busts, famines and plagues that defined life in a large and vibrant city like Bologna. This meant that living with the poor and helping the poor became a very complicated challenge in a society that looked at every reality through the lenses of gender, class, and religion. Male artisans, professionals, clergy, and nobles wrote treatises, passed laws, and established institutions to get some grip on poverty. Yet their plans had to be built around women’s particular needs and prospects, and around women’s more limited opportunities to earn money. And when it came to direct contact with the poor, they had to draw middle- and upper-class women into their ambitious schemes. The women they drew in sometimes had different understandings of poverty and different priorities when helping the poor. Not everyone agreed on what charity looked like, or why, how, or to whom it ought to be given. Conflicts were inevitable, and the “Orders and Provisions” provide us with an entry into some of them.

Two Cultures of Charity

ORDERS AND PROVISIONS FOR THE LADY PRIORESSES OF THE PIOUS CHARITABLE AGENCY FOR THE BEGGARS

The Executive Officers of the Opera Pia de’Mendicanti, having explained to the full Executive that the generosity of the Lady Prioresses of this Opera has advanced in spending that some think to be superfluous, and that this works to the detriment of the Opera and of the poor themselves, wishes now to be able to spend this money to the greater good of the poor. Because of this, the said Executive herewith orders that the Lady Prioresses are requested in the future to abstain from any expenses which might be judged superfluous, and in particular they declare this to be the case with the following, thus:

Making or giving gifts of silk flowers and meals to the gentlewomen and gentlemen [cavalieri] who collect alms on the feast day of S. Gregory. It is enough to offer only some light refreshments without fruit preserves or treats.

Spending any more on silverware for the use of one of the three Churches, which are quite decently furnished at the present.

Giving two yards of quality cloth to some people at the shelter of S. Gregorio who have refused to wear the common uniform of that place.

Giving the officials underwear that is too delicate, and giving French collars to the abandoned boys in the city hostel.

Giving pastries and sweet tortes [pastizzi e crostate] and such things at the meals that the Lady Prioresses offer at the conclusion of their terms to the people in the three homes.

It is also suggested that the Lady Prioresses not buy [additional] quality cloths since the usual 20,000 feet of drygoods that are assigned for linens, underwear, and uniforms and that are made by the people whom the Opera assigns to that task are sufficient. And abundant quantities of linen and wool and many other useful things are generated from the alms gathering on the feast day of St. Gregory in the parishes and neighborhoods of the city, and from the earnings of the work of those people noted above.²

Bologna’s Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti was a multifaceted welfare service that organized charitable assistance to the poor in a city of roughly sixty thousand. It took formal shape in 1560 as the capstone of an emerging network of charitable institutions, activities, and loan funds that had been coalescing for decades through the efforts of civic, confraternal, and mendicant institutions. Though never officially a civic magistracy, it operated as a quasi-governmental agency under the institutional form of a confraternity. Many of its members were merchants and artisans of the kind who had typically formed the backbone of renaissance Italian confraternities. They were active in the hospitals, processions, feasts, and prayers by which these brotherhoods made a devotional life together and shaped the social life of the city. Yet some of those in the OPM’s broad membership body (the corporale) or its executive board of officers (the congregazione) held high political offices and boasted extensive patronage ties. This gave the OPM strong personal links to the civic Senate, to traditional charitable institutions, and to the main religious houses of the city.³

By the time that the OPM was established by papal decree in 1560, the Bolognese had experimented with all of the innovative poor relief plans then circulating around Europe. From the 1450s through the 1520s they had joined other Italian cities in the effort to rationalize the local patchwork collection of confraternal and monastic pilgrims’ hostels into an interlocking network of specialized hospitals and shelters, although the Bolognese did not go so far as their counterparts in Milan, Genoa, and Ferrara in creating a single Great Hospital (Ospedale Maggiore) to be the keystone of the network.⁴ Each Bolognese hospital began to focus on serving a particular social need and, in some cases, a particular social class: there were two infirmaries for the sick and dying, a foundling home for abandoned illegitimate infants, an orphanage for citizen boys, three conservatories for orphaned and abandoned girls that were calibrated to match the city’s social hierarchy (with one each for girls from poorer artisanal, middling mercantile, and slightly better families), and a syphilitics’ infirmary. From the late fifteenth century, a pawn bank (Monte di Pietà) had been offering low-interest loans to the poor, and through the next century it was developing gradually into something like a civic Bank of Bologna—it actually handled the financial administration of many of the specialized hospitals and the OPM itself. In the late 1530s and 1540s, the Bolognese tried expelling “foreigners” in times of famine, and by the 1550s they were taking detailed censuses of the poor and handing out food and relief payments at neighborhood distribution centers to those whom the census takers had assessed as truly needy.⁵ We will look more closely at all of these plans in the next few chapters.

Rationalization, expulsion, a census of the poor, centralized distribution: Italian and European cities tried all of these “reform” measures through the first decades of the sixteenth century, and all worked to greater or lesser degrees. Though once presented as radical innovations of the discipline-oriented sixteenth century, historians now see these civic actions as rooted firmly in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century religious and political values. What was new to the sixteenth century, and what attracted those who saw in poor relief an opportunity for broader social and religious engineering, was the poorhouse or beggar’s hostel—a secure centralized shelter where the poor were housed, fed, trained, set to work, and then eventually restored to society as productive workers. Opening a shelter like this was a way of clearing beggars off the streets, with laws and beggar catchers rounding up the miscreants and pushing them into the poorhouse, where they could start to work for a living. Yet it was a hard step to take.

Genoa had devised an Office of the Poor (Ufficio dei poveri) as early as 1539 that distributed alms, food, and dowries, that liberated slaves, and that sent beggars to jail or apprenticeships. Yet it did not open its workhouse until after a plague in 1579–1580.⁶ Venice’s Provisioners of Health (Provveditori alla Sanità) were empowered in 1529 and again in 1545 to eliminate begging, send the poor to hostels, and distribute food and alms, although little came of the plan, and a workhouse did not open until 1595.⁷ Florence had established a group of Provisioners over the Derelicts and Beggars (Provveditori sopra li derelitti e mendicanti) and projected a permanent workhouse from at least 1541, but a series of Medici dukes backed away from a plan they feared might stimulate opposition and so give more comfort to their enemies than to the poor. It would not be until the crises of 1620 that Florence’s poorhouse finally opened under the name of the Hospital of the Beggars (Ospedale dei Mendicanti).⁸

Bologna’s Ospedale dei Mendicanti was among the first Italian poorhouses to open and remain open, but other cities quickly followed: Brescia in 1577, Rome in 1581, Turin in 1584, Venice in 1594, and Genoa in 1653.⁹ These poorhouses had large dormitories and locked doors like monasteries and convents, and often they were actually located in old or abandoned religious houses. Aimed at both sheltering the indigent and policing the indolent, they emerged in many European cities in the sixteenth century, and then continued evolving through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into asylums and prisons.¹⁰ Their very size and cost made them a hard sell in cities whose magistrates and rulers weren’t accustomed to paying for much more than a small set of bureaucrats to look after tax collecting and administration, a set of judges and prisons for justice, a military force (usually the largest expenditure of all), occasional public works, and a few musicians. Beyond cost, these workhouses could emerge only when civic rulers decided that poverty was a civic problem, and perhaps a civic opportunity. Monks and confraternities had cared for the poor for centuries, and until the sixteenth century many civic elites could see no particular reason why this should change. In many cases change, when it came, hardly looked like change at all. Many workhouses, like the one in Bologna, were built on, by, and with the very tools—confraternities, monasteries, civic alms—that had been used for centuries.

For the Bolognese the sixteenth century was, quite literally, the best of times and the worst of times. Certainly it was a time of recurring famines and plagues, ongoing political tensions, and endemic poverty, and these together forced open the doors of individual hospices and shelters and got various financial schemes off the ground. Yet it was also a time of steady industrial growth, expanding wealth, intellectual ferment, and cultural experimentation, and these created a society with the means, imagination, and individuals to push ideas forward. The city had lost any pretense of political independence when Julius II entered in triumph in 1506, but under the papal rule that evolved over the next century and that then continued on till the French arrived in 1796, a broad oligarchy of wealthy families formed. Men of the Pepoli, de Grassi, Aldrovandi, Malvezzi, and Boncompagni families took leading roles in civil and papal government. This oligarchy began narrowing down significantly by the seventeenth century, but until then its members celebrated and announced their positions with dozens of new and lavish palaces built along the city’s main streets, and with spreading villas at the hub of huge rural estates. In these same decades, technical innovations and a deliberate industrial strategy allowed Bologna’s silk industry to seize and dominate a corner of the European market, bringing fortunes to a handful of merchant-investors and employment to many thousands of Bolognese women and men.¹¹

Private fortunes certainly erected many urban palaces, but public and institutional buildings were also dramatically reshaping Bologna’s streetscape. For the first time the city’s Senate established a building commission, the Assunteria dell’Ornato, to oversee designs, expropriations, and construction of public and private spaces. Through this body it gave subsidies to new orders like the Jesuits and to existing religious houses like Corpus Domini, S. Domenico, and S. Michele in Bosco that were building or renovating their public churches. Domenico Tibaldi gave a classicizing terminus to the city’s major east-west street with his facade for the new Hospital of S. Francesco, and visitors arriving in Bologna from Milan, Florence, or Ferrara passed by the new facades or porticoes of other hospitals like the S. Maria del Baraccano, S. Bartolomeo di Reno, or SS. Pietro e Procolo once they entered through the city gates. With Bologna’s ecclesiastical promotion to archdiocesan status in 1582 came the first stages of extensive renovations to the cathedral and construction of a new palace and courtyard adjacent to it.¹²

Moving into the city’s center, the area of the Piazza Maggiore was dramatically reshaped in the 1560s and 1570s. Jacopo Vignola’s impressive new facade for the Portico of the Banks defined the piazza’s eastern edge (1563–1568), while Giambalogna’s monumental Neptune fountain defined its center (1564–1566), and the new and custom-built Archiginnasio Palace for the university (1563) and a new building for the Ospedale della Morte led out the southeast end. All that remained was to finish the facade of the civic basilica of S. Petronio along the southern boundary of the piazza, and in 1572 the head of the building commission opened negotiations with Andrea Palladio for the project. Even the fortresslike Palazzo Comunale on the square’s western edge received a makeover with a ceremonial gate by Domenico Tibaldi that was dominated by Alessandro Menegati’s monumental statue of Gregory XIII (1576–1580), a hardly subtle sign that the business of the Commune was the business of the papacy. Vast and extensive, the Palazzo Comunale was the nerve center of civic government, with a troop of Swiss Guards watching over the masses who flooded through its gates: magistrates, taxpayers, notaries, criminals, informers, bureaucrats, and functionaries. The city’s Senate and magistracies did their business here, members of the communal-era Council of the Elders (the Anziani) lived here through the length of their two-month terms, and the papal legate who ruled the city together with these others in cooperation and competition could ride in his coach all the way to his apartments on the third floor by means of a special internal ramp. Once there, he could look out of his windows onto the botanical garden that Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor at Bologna’s university, laid out in the palazzo’s central courtyard from 1568. Bologna’s botanical garden was among the first and largest in Europe, just as its Archiginnasio was the first purpose-built university building on the continent.¹³

The point here is not to score points for local patriotism by assembling a list of “firsts,” but to convey some sense of the atmosphere of excitement, expansion, and experimentation that filled Bologna at that time. It was a fertile time across Italy, as new buildings and squares were dramatically reshaping the urban and social landscapes of many cities. Rome, Florence, and Milan were seeing their streets and piazzas reshaped by architects and patrons who were reaching for magnificence. But these were cities under single dominant rulers. Bologna had more of the sometimes chaotic openness and energy of a place like Venice or Genoa. In these cities the governing class divided into competing groups and overlapping magistracies, leaving many loopholes, advocates, and prote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• 1. Showing the Poor a Good Time: Gender, Class, and Charitable Cultures
• 2. Worthy Poor, Worthy Rich: Women’s Poverty and Charitable Institutions
• 3. Tightening Control: The Narrowing Politics of Charity
• 4. Meeting the Bottom Line: Alms, Taxes, Work, and Legacies
• 5. The Wheel Keeps Turning: Moving Beyond the Opera
• 6. Baroque Piety and the Qualità of Mercy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index