Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy, by Nicholas Terpstra

Abstract

Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy, by Nicholas Terpstra. Harvard University Press, 2013. xii, 379 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). In this compellingly written book Nicholas Terpstra examines charitable reform in Bologna from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Based on rich archival and printed material, the study meticulously places the Bolognese welfare system at the crossroads of political change, economic realities, and shifting notions and practices. Bologna's charitable system was an exemplary one and a model to imitate in early modern Italy. Challenging prevailing scholarly conceptions and advancing interpretations, the book contributes significantly to the historiography of poverty and welfare reform in early modern Europe. Continuity and change are often addressed in the study. Terpstra reassesses narratives of the formation of the welfare system as a linear development that gradually led to more disciplined and impersonal forms of and offers a more complex view of the conditions that shaped the early modern welfare system. He argues that early modern poor relief was not a radical departure from medieval tradition and suggests that a distinction between and cultures of is more meaningful than older notions of traditional charity and new philanthropy. In patronal it was the selfless duty of the rich to help the poor. This personal and spiritual contact offered the poor some kind of security, and offered the rich public honour and the poor recipient's prayers. Practical involved assistance to the poor and needy in a more rational and impersonal way, aiming at securing forms of practical assistance like work, education, food supplements, and shelter. Practical required well-organized institutions and effective fundraising either from taxes or from work carried out within the shelters. For all their differences and potential tensions, patronal and practical charitable cultures and practices coexisted in early modern Bologna. The Foucauldian notions of discipline, surveillance, and punishment are critically addressed. Terpstra's examination of the Bolognese welfare system demonstrates that the early reformers were thinking about shelters more as safe homes than as disciplinary or punitive enclosures. In the late sixteenth century, when poverty was identified with female sexual deviance and sin, shelters became much more disciplined. By the mid-seventeenth century, economic pressures and the political climate of the city made profit and punishment the main forces behind charitable initiatives. However, even then the workhouses seldom reached the level of work discipline that organizers aimed for (p. 170). Terpstra's work reveals a complex interplay between the evolving charitable system and the city's politics. The long-standing contest between older communal and republican traditions and newer oligarchic forms, papal interference in Bolognese politics, and the fear of a Bentivoglio restoration, all had a significant impact on the formation of the Bolognese charitable system. The first steps toward poor relief had been taken in the mid-fifteenth century and had been based on confraternal and guild models that encouraged mutual assistance. However, from the mid-sixteenth century, as the Elders, Tribunes, and Masters of the Guilds steadily lost power and the oligarchic Senate took control of the city, the administration of charitable institutions became increasingly centralized (chapter 3). …