Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650 ed. by Anne M. Scott (review)

Designed to complement an earlier volume, Experiences of Poverty (Ashgate, 2012), this collection of thirteen essays explores what it meant to participate in charity in medieval and early modern England and France. While the earlier work sought the voices of the poor, this collection aims to illuminate the mental world, motivations, and social context of those who gave to the poor, whether as individuals or institutions.

The essays primarily seek to intervene in two main historiographical debates. One is to provide a definitive rebuttal to the idea that medieval society sought only to alleviate, not eliminate, poverty, and that key institutional interventions in relieving poverty were a product of the sixteenth century. The second is a more open discussion around motivations for charitable giving, its role in the social and religious world of early modern, or indeed any, society, and particularly the nature of the reciprocal exchange between giver and recipient. While primarily focused on the period 1250 to 1650, this latter intervention in the historiography enables an engagement with scholars of charity, giving, and poverty across eras and nations, and ensures this collection will be of use to a broad range of scholars. Coherent as a collection, the essays themselves are consistently intelligent, articulate, and beautifully edited.

The collection is divided into two parts: ‘The Written Record’ and ‘The Material Record’. The first set of ten essays access charity through the more traditional sources of medieval and early modern history: institutional, civic, clerical, and crown records, statutes, chronicles, and wills. The chapters proceed in chronological order across the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, providing a relatively consistent story of the foundational structures and beliefs around charitable giving that underpinned later institutional developments and reform in the sixteenth century in France and England. Sharon Farmer explicitly traces these connections in her work on Paris institutions for the poor over three centuries; Jennifer Stemmle reinforces the provision of early institutional charity with a case study of twelfth-century leprosaria; and Neil S. Rushton seeks to rehabilitate the sixteenth-century Church by recalculating (upwards) the percentage of their income that they distributed as charity. Other essays, including those by Susan Broomhall on Gap and Lesley Silvester on Norwich, seek to articulate the relationship between Church and civic traditions and models of charitable giving, exploring the overlaps, tensions, and relationships between different community groups.

Most of the chapters at some point explore the motivations for giving, providing some key insights into how charity was understood as a concept, and particularly its relationship to religious maxims. Lisa Keane Elliott’s case study of Nicholas Houel’s charitable motivations provides a reassuring glimpse that at least some givers had good intentions. A number of authors engage in a wider reconceptualisation of giving that seeks to explore charity as a reciprocal exchange relationship. This is particularly notable in Spencer Young’s examination of fourteenth-century exempla of charitable giving, the late Philippa Maddern’s discussion of bequests to the poor and will-making, and Silvester’s chapter on reforming Norwich charitable giving; for all these authors, charitable giving brought benefits, temporal and spiritual, to both parties. Some of the more cynical readings of this relationship wonder, especially given the rise in models of the deserving and undeserving poor during the period, whether charity was anything other than simply selfish. Conversely, Broomhall’s chapter on London Huguenots reminds us that, whatever the motivations of the giver, recipients could be demanding and ungrateful too, acting as an overt challenge to a romantic understanding of the charitable relationship. In having this debate, these essays contribute to a wider and ongoing discussion of the meanings of kindness, gratitude, charity, and community in both past and present societies.

The second, shorter, part of the collection comprises three chapters that use distinctive sources to provide alternative histories of charitable giving. Nicholas Dean Brodie uses a nineteenth-century prosecution for theft to provide a history of the physical...