Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History) by Nicholas Terpstra


Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History)
Title : Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0674067096
ISBN-10 : 9780674067097
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 400
Publication : First published February 11, 2013
Awards : Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize (2014), Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize (2014)

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."

Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History) Reviews

  • Hannah Trower

    Well researched and interesting overview of the way that charity functioned in Bologna, with particular attention drawn to the way that it impacted the lives of women and the reality of female-life-stage poverty in the early modern period. Mostly centered around the late 16th century, there is also information going back as early as the 1420s and forward in a broad scope to today. Scholarly work with ample specific figures and references and acknowledgement of where the historical record is missing, each chapter also begins with a narrativized and fictionalized (but true to life) story of the kinds of people who were directly impacted by Bologna's innovations in charity---both positively and negatively. In focusing on charity and the poor, there is also good information on how the silk industry, prostitution, patronage networks, and marriage played into that. Particularly interesting for me to compare to my own mental map of the streets of Bologna from living there right now.