Do good unto all: Charity and poor relief across Christian Europe, 1400-1800

For nearly two millennia, Christians have tried to make sense of the Bible’s reminder that the poor are ‘always among us’. This volume explores the diverse range of ideas, institutions, and experiences early modern Europeans brought to bear in response to this biblical adage.

Do good unto all traces the concept and practice of charity across the four major early modern Christian confessions – Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist – and over a wide range of geographical areas from Scotland to Switzerland and the Spanish Atlantic World. By bringing such a diverse set of localised studies into concert for the first time, this volume exposes the many intersections and tensions that arose between and within communities as they attempted to translate the ideal of charity into practice. This comparative approach shifts the focus from binary definitions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor or ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. Instead, Do good unto all charts a new course for the study of charity beyond institutional poor relief, where the matrix of individual ideas and experiences can be fully appreciated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526162465

Book preview

Do good unto all

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY

This series aims to promote challenging and innovative research in all areas of early modern European history. For over twenty years it has published monographs and edited volumes that make an original contribution to our understanding of the period and is particularly interested in works that engage with current historiographical debates and methodologies, including race, emotions, materiality, gender, communication, medicine and disability, as well as interdisciplinary studies. Europe is taken in a broad sense and the series welcomes projects on continental (Western, Central and Eastern Europe), Anglo-European and trans-cultural, global histories that explore the world’s relationship with Europe during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

series editors

Sara Barker, Laura Kounine and William G. Naphy

Full details of the series and all previously published titles are available at https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/studies-in-early-modern-european-history/

Do good unto all

Charity and poor relief across Christian Europe, 1400–1800

Edited by Timothy G. Fehler and Jared B. Thomley

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6247 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

Cover image: ‘Feeding the Hungry’ – Panel 1 from the Master of Alkmaar’s Seven Works of Mercy (1504). Inscription on frame under the panel reads: ‘deelt mildelick den armen // god zal u weder ontfarmen’ (‘Give liberally to the poor, God will have mercy on you in return’). Rijksmuseum, SK-A-2815-1

Typeset

by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow

Contents

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Beyond poor relief: defining, implementing, and experiencing charity – Timothy G. Fehler and Jared B. Thomley

Part I Defining charity

1 Domingo de Soto and itinerant poverty: a mobile concept – Beatriz E. Salamanca

2 No greater act of mercy: ‘Cellites’ and the ars moriendi in the fifteenth century – Abigail J. Hartman

3 Charity’s assurance: exhortation and election in seventeenth-century Scotland – Jared B. Thomley

Part II Implementing charity

4 Legislation and poor relief: Bugenhagen and the Reformation in Braunschweig – Esther Chung-Kim

5 ‘Under the guise of Christian generosity’: Anabaptist responses to poverty in Reformed Zurich, 1600–1650 – David Y. Neufeld

6 Theatrical charity in the early modern Spanish world – Rachael Ball

7 ‘Especially unto those of the household of faith’: Menso Alting, discipline, and community in Emden’s social welfare – Timothy G. Fehler

Part III Experiencing charity

8 Household and hospital: negotiating social welfare and social discipline in Reformation Geneva – Kristen C. Howard

9 The Marillac family as charitable benefactors: family strategy and the rhetoric of poor relief in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France – Edward J. Gray

10 The pilgrim as temporary pauper: the changing landscape of hospitality on the Camino de Santiago, 1550–1750 – Elizabeth Tingle

11 Prostitution, repentance, and civic welfare in Renaissance Florence – Gillian Jack

Index

Contributors

Rachael Ball is Associate Professor of European and World History at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of numerous works on political and popular culture in the early modern Iberian world, including Treating the Public: Charitable Theater and Civic Health in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2017) and Cómo Ser Rey. Instrucciones del Emperador Carlos V a su hijo Felipe. Mayo de 1543 (2014).

Esther Chung-Kim is Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. She is the author and editor of works on religious reform, biblical interpretation, and the history of poverty, including Inventing Authority: Use of the Church Father in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (2011), Reformation Commentary on Scripture: Acts (2014), and Economics of Faith: Reforming Poor Relief in Early Modern Europe (2021).

Timothy G. Fehler is the William E. Leverette Professor of History at Furman University in South Carolina. He is the author and editor of studies of the social effects of religious change, particularly on charity, toleration, and migration, including Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (1999) and Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile (2014).

Edward J. Gray is a researcher at Huma-Num (CNRS), the French national infrastructure for digital humanities, and Officer for National Coordination at DARIAH ERIC. His research interests focus on the interplay of religion, politics, and family strategy in early modern Europe. He defended his dissertation, ‘The Marillac: Family Strategy, Religion, and Diplomacy in the Making of the French State during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ in 2020 and is revising it for publication.

Abigail J. Hartman is Visiting Instructor of History at Furman University, South Carolina. Her article ‘Poetry and the Cause of Simon de Montfort after the Battle of Evesham’ was the 2019 prize-winning essay in The Mediaeval Journal. She completed her PhD dissertation, which examines the Cellites’ deathbed and funeral charity within their urban contexts, at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Kristen C. Howard is Assistant Librarian at the McGill University Library, Quebec. She completed a PhD in History from the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies at the University of Arizona in 2020 and a Master of Information Studies at McGill University in 2022.

Gillian Jack received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, UK, and is currently an Associate Lecturer at the Open University where she teaches History and Classical Studies. Her research focuses on prostitution and repentance and civic social welfare in late medieval and early modern Italy.

David Y. Neufeld is Assistant Professor of History at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, Ontario, where he directs the Institute of Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies. His research focuses on early modern Anabaptism, Mennonite historiography, and the history of archives.

Beatriz E. Salamanca received her PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London in 2019 and is a lecturer at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana Cali, Colombia, teaching courses on the History of Law and the History of Political Thought. Her research focuses on early modern travel and identification, as well as the conceptual and emotional components of the history of charity, generosity, and hospitality in Golden Age Spain. She was recently awarded Fellowships at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study.

Jared B. Thomley received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen, UK, in 2021 and is currently revising his dissertation, ‘Charity under the Cross: Charitable Culture in Seventeenth-Century Scotland’, for publication. His research focuses on theological and civic interpretations of charity in early modern Britain and Scottish diasporic communities.

Elizabeth Tingle is Professor of History at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She researches the French Wars of Religion and the Catholic Reformation in early modern Europe. Her recent books include Indulgences after Luther: Pardons in Counter-Reformation France 1500–1700 (2015) and Sacred Journeys: Long Distance Pilgrimage in North-Western Europe in the Counter-Reformation (2020).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the contributors for their responses to comments and queries on their chapters and for their patient commitment to the project as the pandemic made research difficult and upended health and timetables. We were assisted by the advice of Meredith Carroll, the editorial board of Manchester University Press’s Studies in Early Modern European History series, and the anonymous readers, whose comments ensured that these individual case studies were woven together.

Tim’s project was underwritten by The Furman Standard Research Grant. He is thankful for the professional and collegial support of Furman University, in particular Lane Harris, and personally for the regular love and encouragement of Jacquelyn, Mireille, Gabrielle, and Polly. He dedicates his chapter to the memory of Walter Schulz († 2019), the Emden visionary who supported his research for three decades, with final encouragement about this work on Menso Alting, charity, and discipline in the church.

Jared is grateful for the mentorship of Bill Naphy, who provided the early encouragement that made this volume possible. He is also thankful for the companionship and patience offered by Fiona during the many late evenings of research and revision. He dedicates his chapter to Brad and Karen who have so selflessly given him a lifetime of love and support.

Introduction

Beyond poor relief: defining, implementing, and experiencing charity

Timothy G. Fehler and Jared B. Thomley

Disentangling the complex relationship between religion and poverty has been a key feature of much recent scholarship on the transformations of charity that occurred in Europe during the early modern period. Christianity, especially as practised in medieval Europe, placed significant spiritual value on poverty and charity. The fact that sixteenth-century Europeans witnessed fundamental changes both to Christianity and to approaches to poor relief led to frequent causal assumptions, even among some contemporaries, which directly linked the phenomena. This introductory chapter will begin by sketching out the basic topography of recent historiography of early modern charity and poor relief before turning to synthesise the fresh approaches and threads that run through this volume’s diverse collection of cross-confessional and transnational studies. By considering the newest and most creative historical approaches, this chapter both nuances and challenges many of the well-worn historiographical paths and charts a new course for the study of poor relief and charity.

Poverty and charity in an era of religious change

The traditional discourse on the transformation of medieval charity into early modern centralised poor relief hinges on the premise that the Reformation somehow upended and replaced Catholic charity.¹ The Christian ideal of charity included a number of acts of mercy that could ‘show love of God … by providing assistance to one’s needy neighbour’.² Alms, hospitality, and service were just some of the forms that the multi-layered concept of charity could take, whether on an individual or institutional basis, in assisting the poor and needy; as Abigail J. Hartman discusses in Chapter 2, extensive lists of Spiritual and Corporal Acts of Mercy had been enumerated by the High Middle Ages. Motivations for charitable giving in a medieval context have been traditionally presented as clear-cut; the Catholic theology of good works offered believers an opportunity at least nominally to work towards their salvation and mitigate time in purgatory by giving to the poor. Here, personal incentive for acting charitably is painted quite clearly. With the emergence of ‘Protestant’ poor relief, however, the focus shifts away from the individual’s motivation (salvation); until the second half of the twentieth century, many histories were largely confessional and argued that the new theological impetus compelled new relief institutions with more social incentives for charity taking centre stage. While this narrative has been significantly tempered and nuanced, it is still present in the current historiography.³ Thus, modern scholars have painted Europe’s sixteenth-century changes in the methods and practice of poor relief as ‘a radical departure from the beaten paths of medieval charity’⁴ whose cumulative transformation might be seen as ‘the beginning of modern social welfare’.⁵ To what extent, however, were these changes linked to religious motivations and the Protestant Reformation or driven, rather, by secular, socio-economic forces?

Although the impact of Martin Luther’s sola fide certainly shaped intellectual questions raised by Protestants regarding charity, scholarship has established that it is no longer sufficient to explain all differences in early modern approaches to poverty. Beyond Luther’s rejection of Catholic soteriology in which good works could contribute towards salvation, he also condemned mendicant orders and confraternities. By depicting these acts of good works or charity as selfish (to aid one’s own salvation rather than to help a needy neighbour) and the institutions as fraudulent, Luther’s approach combined theological and social criticisms. Some of Luther’s fellow Protestants went even further than Luther was willing to go in his theological criticisms. Wittenberg University colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, for instance, published a pamphlet in early 1522 that at least rhetorically linked two errors he saw among contemporary Christians, On the Abolition of Images and That There Should Be No Beggars Among Christians. Although modern English versions of the pamphlet are often published as two separate essays given the apparently divergent topics of images and poor relief, Karlstadt clearly identified and linked the existence of two maladies in the Church and Christian society, which he felt must urgently be removed as offences to God.⁶ Theologically, the Catholic Church’s use of images led to false worship and idolatry; in light of the second half of the pamphlet’s title, the scale of begging that existed around the city of Wittenberg was a sign that called into question the existence of Christians. In other words, Karlstadt’s definition of a ‘true Christian’ is connected inextricably to his call for the Church both to remove images and to eliminate begging.

Subsequent Protestants made explicit the financial harm to charity created by the Roman Church’s false theology by pointing out the large sums of money that could be better spent on the poor. Another early Protestant pastor, Martin Bucer, published a 1524 treatise explaining the basis for the innovations in communion that had been recently adopted in Strasbourg. Although the spiritual benefits of images, saints, and pilgrimages were among the most visible expressions of Catholic theology to the lives of the laity, Bucer argued that these were ‘unchristian’ because they were ‘against both faith and love’.⁷ Not only do these beliefs and practices cause people to seek and worship ultimately false gods, but the people then also give to the idols their gifts, which should be given to the poor. In other words, faulty theology leads to deficiencies in charity (i.e. love). Yet, as we will see, Catholic reformers would also push for reforms in what they considered misuse of alms; so is the Protestant Reformation still a useful line of inquiry to help us comprehend the range of differences in poor relief, from charitable expectations to the experience of poverty?

An interpretive shift, which has marked subsequent scholarship on early modern poor relief, away from confessional distinctiveness, started in earnest with Natalie Zemon Davis’s work on Catholic Lyon in an article originally published in 1968.⁸ Davis carefully highlighted the centralising trend seen in the 1534 creation of Lyon’s aumône générale as city officials sought to deal with a dramatic growth of poverty, vagrancy, and begging. Even though some Catholic clerics at the time characterised such charitable reform measures proposed by Catholic humanists such as Juan Luis Vives and Jean de Vauzelles as ‘heretical and Lutheran’, Davis indicated that such shifts in methods of charitable distribution need not be attributed solely to Protestant theology.⁹ At the same time, Brian Pullan’s study of Catholic Venice demonstrated the reality that new early modern poor relief programmes often cut across religious boundaries with Catholic and Protestant cities adopting similar reforms, which were usually built upon trends that had developed within medieval charity.¹⁰ Subsequent research, increasingly in local case studies, has largely confirmed that poor relief reforms were not established neatly along confessional lines, but that certain features can be found in both Protestant and Catholic territories.¹¹

The discovery of similarities in poor relief programmes across confessions has led to a growing tendency to separate the Reformations from analyses of poor relief reforms. If certain Protestant governmental systems of poor relief had their counterparts in Catholic regions, perhaps the focus should be on socio-economic causes. In the early 1990s, Robert Jütte attempted to collate the research of the preceding thirty years to provide a general guide to poverty and poor relief in early modern Europe. While he acknowledges the impetus provided by Luther’s principles ‘for the development of a new social policy which favoured secular systems of poor relief’, Jütte found the common socio-economic methods and features in early modern poor relief to be the more useful framework of analysis.¹² Such a historiographic movement away from confessional distinctiveness has often pushed the early modern religious transformations into the background (if they are mentioned at all). For instance, most chapters in the Routledge History of Poverty (2021) emphasise the ways in which the experience of poverty was shaped by material culture, the environment, and social and economic circumstances.¹³ While the religious nature of early modern Europeans is acknowledged, the Routledge History of Poverty’s move towards a new definition of poverty does not analyse the ways in which religious ideas and expectations contributed to the methods of poor relief and the reactions to poverty.¹⁴

There have also been historiographic calls to ‘re-insert’ the Reformation into the narrative of early modern European poor relief. Ole Peter Grell did not want a return to the older confessional explanations with their mono-causal emphasis on Lutheran theology of good works and salvation, yet he urged consideration of distinct religious conceptions – for example, that Protestantism allowed poor relief to be understood as a ‘civil obligation to the Christian commonwealth’ that moved the emphasis onto the living poor and their social problems rather than focusing on the afterlife – in order to understand early modern poverty and charity appropriately.¹⁵ Grell and Andrew Cunningham have since published two volumes covering the early modern period – Healthcare and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500–1700 (1997) and Healthcare and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe (1999) – that have attempted to highlight ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ themes in the development of healthcare and social welfare.¹⁶ Although these volumes have done well to widen the geographic scope of inquiry while critically analysing the role of religion in early modern poor relief, their mono-confessional focus has limited the breadth of their comparative analysis within each separate volume. Broadening the scope, Esther Chung-Kim’s Economics of Faith (2021) offers a comparative analysis of poor relief in theology and policy across several Protestant confessional understandings of poverty and approaches to poor relief.¹⁷ Chung-Kim’s synthesis of early modern poor relief reforms enables an understanding of the prominent, common features of each particular theological framework (Lutheran, Calvinist/Reformed, and Anabaptist) while making clear that there really was no single confessional experience in practice.

Given the historiographical fascination with the role of religious confession in the performance and organisation of charity, it is curious that the rich mono-confessional case studies have so rarely been brought into concert in a single comparative analysis. Thomas Safley created such a collection in 2003 in an attempt to gauge the value of a Weberian description of secularisation or rationalisation in explaining the realities of early modern poor relief.¹⁸ The local case studies that made up Safley’s collection confirmed that the complex motives and goals of early modern poor relief could not be fully analysed without recognising the institutional role of churches and the continued legacy of the sacred character of charity. In a 2005 essay synthesising many of the cross-confessional findings across Europe, Pullan determined that important distinctions between Catholic and Protestant principles can be seen even where scholars have recognised similar institutional responses to poverty.¹⁹ However, rather than focusing on the religious disagreement about the place of good works in one’s salvation, Pullan identified a theological difference that he termed ‘redemptive charity’, which could be found more readily in Catholic responses to poverty than in Protestant areas. Namely, Catholic territories were more likely to establish or maintain charitable institutions which made greater allowances for individual immoral behaviour and which might redeem recipients, whereas Protestants placed a greater emphasis on rigorous discipline rather than maintaining a poor relief institution which might be seen as encouraging sinful behaviour. Protestants, for instance, were more uneasy about establishing an institution such as a foundling home (as opposed to an orphanage), for children abandoned by living parents, out of concern about seeming to condone immoral behaviour such as adultery and prostitution with their resultant unwanted pregnancies. Therefore, Pullan concludes by explaining differences in approaches to poverty that involved institutions such as foundling hospitals, loan banks, and houses for former prostitutes with advice that scholars ‘bear in mind the Catholic principle of tolerating a lesser evil for the sake of a greater good [i.e. relieving poverty]’.²⁰

Recent generations of research, then, have provided sophisticated, multi-layered insights about the particular political, socio-economic, material, medical, and other interests that shaped early modern poor relief, enhancing our understanding of the period and its people. At the same time, historians recognise that early modern Europeans themselves understood, rationalised, and articulated charity and poor relief through the prism of faith. This present volume has brought the studies of Catholic and Protestant communities together in the same collection, a trans-confessional approach to the study of poverty and charity that allows for the comparison of the ideas of charitability and the practice of poor relief in Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist communities. Scholarship since the 1960s has established the necessity of local case studies in order to understand the mechanisms propelling poor relief in any region, and by anchoring our comparative analysis in the immediate, local circumstances, we attempt to avoid excessive over-simplification. Nevertheless, the cross-confessional comparisons are further enhanced by surveying an extensive range of European polities across the Holy Roman Empire, France, Geneva, Zurich, Italy, Scotland, and Spain (with its Atlantic world). The diverse experiences captured here yield important comparative results that challenge and clarify a number of foundational assumptions regarding the impact of religion on the experiences, definitions, and expectations of poverty and charity.

While several strands cut across the chapters, the volume is organised into three thematic, multi-confessional parts that will enable a deeper engagement with the complicated movement and interplay between the ideals and practices of early modern European poor relief. The chapters in Part I (‘Defining charity’) deal in particular with the ways that theologians and religious groups theorised about the nature of poverty and the appropriate way to practise charity. Part II (‘Implementing charity’) deals with the institutions and policies that were established to perform or to regulate charity and poor relief. The volume’s final part (‘Experiencing charity’) emphasises the experience of giving and receiving charity on the familial and personal level, looking at the limitations that might be placed on charity or the ways that those who lacked a family network might experience poverty. That each of the chapters touches on questions raised in other parts of the book helps to highlight the interplay between theory and practice; in other words, charity was no mere ‘top down’ process, but it involved multi-layered intersections between ideals and expectations of charity, institutions of poor relief, and individual recipients. The case studies in each chapter move us beyond the policies governing early modern poor relief to foster an understanding of the complicated realities involved in putting ideas into practice and also cultivate a recognition of the personal and intimate nature of charity.

Beyond addressing how early modern Europeans thought about, institutionalised, and experienced charity, however, the volume’s chapters reveal several key threads that can be traced through all three organisational parts. The first thread considers the transmission of ideas and how communities adopted, augmented, or rejected them to suit their own needs. The second overarching strand considers boundaries, both real and imagined. And the third thread seeks to locate the role of the individual in a historiography dominated by a focus on charitable institutions. Each of these stand-alone chapters offers important insights into the intersection between religion, poverty, and charity; yet woven together, the various threads provide a valuable comparative study into the diversity of approaches in early modern charity.

Defining charity (Part I: Chapters 1–3)

How did religious leaders define ‘charity’ and do these definitions hold up across confessional lines (or even within them)? Early modern definitions of charity were often grounded in one’s understanding of poverty and its spiritual value, which then shaped motivations for charity and the expectations placed upon both almsgiver and recipient. Theologians and ministers used ideas of charity to achieve something from – or to say something about the nature of – Christians. For example, the Acts of Spiritual and Corporal Mercy provided a late medieval theological codification of appropriate charitable behaviour around the love of others. The seven corporal acts of mercy were feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the stranger, visiting the sick, comforting the prisoner, and burying the dead, and the acts of spiritual mercy were instructing the ignorant, counselling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, reproving the sinner, forgiving injuries, bearing with troublesome people, and praying for all.²¹ Moreover, throughout the Middle Ages, poverty itself – especially, but not exclusively, voluntary poverty – was regarded as having spiritual value, and as such it formed one of the pillars of monastic, mendicant, and confraternal traditions.²² In the later Middle Ages, it was also embraced by laypeople, such as the lay communities called Cellites (later, Alexians) established in the Holy Roman Empire in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In Chapter 2 Abigail J. Hartman explores the Cellites’ dedication not only to voluntary poverty but also to the charitable works of visiting the sick and burying the dead, arguing that such activity was in keeping with the theological claim that ‘there is no work of mercy greater or more profitable … before God’ than deathbed attendance.

Part I’s chapters share the understanding that charity is meant to be performed. Thus, not only for the Cellites but for the later Catholic Reformer Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), too, charity was an essential part of the Christian faith in action. Soto built on the medieval understanding of charity to expand on the rights of the poor. In Chapter 1, Beatriz E. Salamanca analyses Soto’s view of charity – one which did not recognise locality or confession – which bolstered his defence of the freedom of movement of the itinerant poor. Perhaps surprising to traditionally assumed distinctions between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of charity, Jared B. Thomley moves us to Reformed Scotland in Chapter 3, where Protestant ‘giving’ was not merely some cold alternative to a Catholic works-based ‘charity’. By looking at Reformed exhortations to charity, Thomley uncovers the extent to which Scottish theologians defined charity as both an action and a virtue. As a Christian duty commanded by God, it was used as a means to grant comfort to the anxious and was articulated as being the most visible essence of ‘true’ Christian faith.

All three of Part I’s chapters explore the tension between the ideal of charity and the pragmatic realities of temporal existence. Both theorists and practitioners of charity were involved in a constant give and take. In Chapter 1 we see the Spanish theologian Soto grappling with the tension between needing to decide who is undeserving, whilst also giving charity to all those in need. His ideal of charity was not easily reconciled with municipal needs for order and safety, which civic leaders often saw as threatened by the rampant vagabondage that, in turn, was allegedly encouraged by non-discriminating charity given to the itinerant poor. Likewise, in Chapter 2, we find that it was simpler for urban communities to have a dedicated group like the Cellites to serve a communal charitable function, even though devotional literature urged all Christians to attend and minister to their dying neighbours. Moreover, despite the usefulness of such lay groups, Catholic institutional structures struggled to regulate them and had to decide the manner in which they should be formally recognised in the liminal space between charitable ideal and charitable practice.

In Reformed Scotland, as Chapter 3 reveals, the Christian community grappled with a practical implication of the Protestant removal of the spiritual benefits that charity would bring to the giver. The Reformed kirk understood charity to be a natural by-product of faith; yet tension arose between this view of charity and the continued need to exhort charity in a world that was reliant on benevolent giving. Chapter 7 (in Part II) provides a further illustration of the practical tension that could arise among Reformed pastors in justifying the manner chosen for exhorting almsgiving from the elect.

Although the forms could vary across religious confessions and time periods, Protestants seem to have shared with Catholics latent religious expectations for some benefit to be gained from charitable giving. Of course, what we often describe as more secular justifications over the course of the early modern period, such as the appeal to greater civic unity and social order put forward by humanist poor relief reformers like the Spanish Dominican Juan Luis Vives, generally remained coupled with religious expectations. Indeed, while Vives’s reform proposal drawn up for the city of Bruges in 1526 explicitly promoted this-worldly benefits to the city, the spiritual commands and benefits played an integral role in his justification of the reforms.²³ The chapters in Part I illustrate plainly that religious ideas which defined charity did not emerge in a vacuum, and, as the subsequent parts of the volume will develop even more explicitly, ideals often had to be augmented or even modified as leaders sought to implement them. As a foundation of Christian belief, ideas of charity were often used and implicated in debates about doctrine. Each community attempted to articulate what charity was, what it should look like, and which motivations spurred action in its name. Just as the need for purity in doctrine drew early modern theologians to locate the proper manifestation of charity in the realm of the spiritual, however, temporal realities often complicated the implementation of these ideals in practice.

Implementing charity (Part II: Chapters 4–7)

The chapters in Part II deal more expressly with the institutions that were established to perform charity and regulate relief, examining how ideas such as those considered in Part I translated into institutional reform during the early modern period. Each of these chapters focuses on the experiences of a particular confessional community – Lutheran, Anabaptist, Catholic, and Reformed – as they attempted to implement a particular charitable vision or adopt poor relief practices that met the practical, often complicated, social needs of their communities in light of their theological commitments.

Thus, debates about poor relief often triggered intense tensions between various communities that had different interests and feelings of obligation and right. Indeed, implementing new policies, legislation, or institutions to carry out charity could often illuminate fierce differences in understanding the nature of one’s community that had formerly been hidden. The studies published in Michael Halvorson and Karen Spierling’s Defining Community in Early Modern Europe pulled together many examples of the complex (and changeable) operation of community.²⁴ They demonstrated the significance of community definition in early modern Europe, the ways in which community ideals might be imposed by leaders or negotiated within a society, and the multiple markers and boundaries that were used to define a community, such as belief, memory, family, politics, art, and ritual. In our studies of charity, we can observe ways by which the ideas of community shaped the development of relief institutions and vice versa.

Unsurprisingly, conflicts between communities are those most frequently cited in our chapters. Esther Chung-Kim highlights in Chapter 4 the variety of interests that coalesced in opposition to particular policies promoted in the new Lutheran church orders for Braunschweig. The Lutheran camp faced conflict both with Catholics, including from the local lay community of Alexian Brothers (formerly Cellites), and with fellow-Protestant Zwinglians. Additional analysis brings into focus the multiple political, territorial, and regional boundaries which could intersect with issues of wealth, nobility, and social status. In Chapter 5, David Y. Neufeld’s study of the Zurich Anabaptist minority’s attempts to live within a Reformed majority brings into perhaps the sharpest relief the ways that implementing charity highlighted boundaries between confessional communities. Moreover, in addition to the boundaries between the Anabaptist and Reformed communities in Zurich, we also are made aware of the urban/rural and native/foreigner borders.

Yet we also have the opportunity to observe conflicts within religious communities that could emerge over competing ideas and definitions of charity. Thus, Timothy G. Fehler’s analysis in Chapter 7 of the operation of poor relief within Emden, Germany’s Reformed congregation – as some leaders attempted to create a particular diaconate to provide for the poor of the ‘household of faith’ (cf. Galatians 6:10) – reveals doctrinal fault lines within the community that had repercussions in the exercise of both church discipline and poor relief. Similarly, Soto’s articulation of charity (Chapter 1) raised questions regarding the ways in which the Poor Laws in Catholic Spain defined a ‘vagrant’ and