History of Poverty

Through a blend of political-institutional, medical, and socio-cultural history, this dissertation demonstrates that the rapid development of sixteenth-century Venice's public health policy marks not only ·'the medical renaissance of the sixteenth century," but highlights an important development in the history of mentalities as well. Using a wide range of archival and published sources. I argue that when the pre-modem cultural universe-epitomized by a unified. anthropomorphic body-was under siege during the 1500s by a divided Christendom and warring inchoate nation-states, one prescription for Venice in the throes of a major European-wide •'paradigm shift" was to invoke this metaphor of the body (in all of its manifestations: whether as a medical body, a body social. a body politic, etc.). and entrust the continued welfare of this ailing embodiment to its newly created health magistracy. the Provveditori alla Sanità. Since the Venetian patriciate at the time was preoccupied with public exhibitions and ritual assurances of order within the body social and hierarchy within the body politic. the broader social and cuJtura1 implications of early modem epidemiology encouraged a rapid multiplication of the magistracy's powers during the sixteenth century. Those who were perceived as a threat to this order were-as a result of the overlapping metaphors of the body in the early modem worldview- frequently understood to be sources of contagion and/or diseases like the plague who were dangerous to the medical body as well. At the same time. the increasing separation between elite and popular cultures reinforced these associations: physicians-engaged in their own processes of "self-fashioning" -would theorize that the poor possessed a physiologically different body which was inherently predisposed to epidemic disease. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Venetian Magistracy's public health authority would thus extend beyond disease control and sanitation to include the regulation of marginalized groups such as the poor, prostitutes, and popular healers. My dissertation consequently traces the processes by which contemporary visions of the body, health and disease were informed and transformed by the Sanità’s particular reactions to the perceived crises in sixteenth-century Venice.

One obstacle in the way of solid and qualitatively rich historical research on the Irish Poor Law is the loss of major archival sources for the period. While local and national Irish archives possess correspondence registers for individual Poor Law unions, the central Poor Law Commission / Local Government Board files were lost in the 1922 destruction of the Public Records Office, housed at the time in the Four Courts on Dublin’s quayside. It wasn’t until I attended the hugely enjoyable ‘Fragmentary Lives’ event in the National Archives in Kew, London in June, that I realised what a huge loss that really represents....

Chapitre 5 de la thèse de doctorat de Bruno Restif, soutenue en décembre 2004 à l'Université Rennes 2 Haute-Bretagne sous la direction d'Alain Croix : La Paroisse, cadre d'application de la Réforme catholique en Haute-Bretagne (diocèses de Rennes, Dol et Saint-Malo). Histoire d'un processus de transformation religieuse et culturelle (XVIe et XVIIe siècles). Titre du chapitre 5 : Christianiser la société.

Resumen: En las sociedades rurales del Antiguo Régimen el pobre y el fenómeno de la pobreza eran realidades muy complejas y mutables. La definición de estos fenómenos es aún hoy muy complicada. En la Edad Moderna estaba afectada por valores y categorías acuñadas fuera del universo cultural del pobre. No obstante, las personas que experimentaban pobreza lo hacían de forma diversa y reaccionaban de múltiples formas a sus circunstancias vitales. Así lo expresaban a través de sus actitudes, comportamientos y percepciones. La historiografía ha sido consciente de los dilemas científicos y epistemológicos que supone atender a las percepciones endógenas y exógenas de estos fenómenos, así como de las dificultades que plantea el análisis de los mismos. Esta investigación analiza los estigmas de la pobreza, es decir, sus impactos y los comportamientos, actitudes y percepciones del pobre hacia sus circunstancias vitales en sociedades rurales de la España Cantábrica en los Tiempos Modernos. Abstract: Under the absolutist monarchy poor folk and the occurrence of poverty were highly complex and changeable realities in rural societies. Even today it is hard to provide a definition for these phenomena. In the Modern Era it was affected by values and categories forged outside the cultural universe of the poor. Nonetheless, people suffering from poverty did so in diverse fashions and reacted in multiple ways to their life circumstances. This was made explicit by their attitudes, behaviours and perceptions. History writers have been conscious of the academic and epistemological dilemmas that arise from considering the internal and external perceptions of these phenomena. They have also been aware of the difficulties posed by an analysis of them. This piece of research addresses the stigmas of poverty. This means its impacts and the behaviour patterns, attitudes and views of the poor relative to the circumstances of their lives in country societies along the northern coast of Spain in the Modern Era.

During the nineteenth century, public attentiveness of urban poverty in Ottoman urban centers intensified and was followed by the practice of coercive ordering of the poor. This paper discusses how poverty as a social category was used as a signifier of in-group polarization within the late nineteenth-century Jewish community of Izmir. As the relationship between difference, marginality, and exclusion determined the practice of in-group polarization, within the context of Ottoman modernization; the creation of
new sets of boundaries through internal hierarchies put Jews from lower classes on par with the neighboring underprivileged Muslims. This interreligious solidarity among those who were left on the fringes of the cosmopolitan dream resulted in a new form of coexistence among poor Jews and Muslims, although it was under the shadow of certain imperial typologies. Therefore, an analysis of marginal Jewish religious identities in
conjunction with class and state based on the Ottoman, Jewish, and Christian missionary archival sources disprove the myth of monolithic community structures while giving voice to excluded members of the Jewish community of Izmir.

Les misericórdias, des institutions d’assistance qui ont vu le jour au Portugal en 1498 et se sont vite répandues partout, étaient toutes autonomes. Cependant, pour aider les voyageurs et les pèlerins pauvres jugés dignes de secours elles ont mis en place un service réseau, simple et efficace: l'octroi de cartas de guia (lettres de guidance) qui étaient des documents qui identifiaient le voyageur, le lieu d’où il partait et le lieu de sa destination. Avec la lettre, les pauvres recevaient une subvention – ou même, quand ils étaient malades, du transport à cheval ou en chariot – ce que leur permettaient d’arriver jusqu'à la misericórdia suivante. Et donc, d’institution en institution, ils achevaient leurs voyages.
Les carnets de ces services sont, ainsi, de bonnes sources pour l'étude de la mobilité des pauvres. On examinera ici ceux de Coimbra entre 1751 et 1844. Plus de 1000 personnes par an étaient aidées au XVIIIe siècle, mais beaucoup moins au siècle suivant. Toutefois, la documentation du XIXe siècle dépasse en qualité d’information la précédente.

Este trabajo analiza cómo las mujeres esclavas y cautivas se identificaban con la categoría de pobres de los códigos medievales/modernos tanto árabes como cristianos. En el Mediterráneo Levantino el abogado de personas pobres y miserables y el padre de huérfanos fueron dos de las instituciones jurídicas encargados de defender a mujeres que buscaban la libertad para ellas o la reunión familiar. Sobre todo tras el cautiverio de muchas mujeres y niñas tras la rebelión de las Alpujarras granadinas de finales del siglo XVI.
De esta forma podemos observar otra realidad más allá de la imagen tópica de la cautiva o esclava, como objeto de deseo o como mera reproductora. Que hasta ahora no ha permitido que trascienda su capacidad jurídica, ni su valor intercultural en la guerra; diplomática; de poder o, simplemente la necesidad de buscar la libertad en la sociedad que las dominaba.