Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe (review)

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, with Jon Arrizabalaga, eds. Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe. London: Routledge, 1999. ix + 309 pp. Ill. $U.S. 90.00; $Can. 135.00.

This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on relief and health care for the poor in early modern Europe. The focus is on Italy and a number of Italian cities; there are also chapters on Spain, Portugal, and France, and on Augsburg in Germany, together with a smaller number of overviews where the historical knowledge and skills of contributors such as Brian Pullan and Colin Jones are shown to good effect. The book provides a well-balanced discussion of the extent to which the Counter-Reformation created and shaped new forms of poor relief. The contributors have also been conscious of the pre-Counter-Reformation roots and structures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic poor relief, of the influence of the Protestant initiatives, and of the power of contingent factors such as famine or plague to shape events.

For instance, John Henderson in his well-balanced account of charity and welfare in Florence and Tuscany points out that the statutes of Cosimo I concerning abandoned children and beggars were probably initiated because of the effects of the famine of 1539, and that the years of plenty that followed meant that the laws were not put into effect despite being in keeping with Counter-Reformation sentiment. In Jon Arrizabalaga's historiographically sophisticated overview of poor relief in Counter-Reformation Castile, the force of political and economic factors is balanced against that of purely religious ones. Although the consolidation of a large number of hospitals into very few was a joint enterprise of the crown and the church and reflected the centralizing tendency of the Counter-Reformation, the failure of the policy flowed from an economic judgment as to the relative costs of centralized and devolved health care, as well as from a lack of political will following the death of Phillip II.

Further clouding of our ability to discuss the effects of the Counter-Reformation can be found in the example of the Portuguese confraternities or misericordias, the first of which was founded in 1498. They spread throughout Portugal and its overseas possessions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, as Isabel Mendes Drummond Braga shows, their pre-Counter-Reformation aim of providing charitable help to the poor, combined with the desire to police them and save their souls, fitted well with the Counter-Reformation, as did their care of abandoned children. Protestant countries also provided for the poor and foundlings with a similar mix of coercion and benevolence. Moreover, attempts in the early sixteenth century to rationalize poor relief can be found in both Protestant and Catholic towns and countries.

Does this mean that the Counter-Reformation contributed nothing that was distinctive to poor relief and health care in Southern Europe? No--what was distinctive was the element of spirituality that was lacking in Protestant poor relief. The reputation and honor of poor girls, the spiritual salvation of abandoned children, of the poor, of the sick, were all concerns in what Richard Palmer calls, in his outstanding article on health care and poor relief in Venice, "the new philanthropy" that began in Venice well before the Council of Trent with the reform-minded Companies of Divine Love in the 1520s. The "new Catholicism" created not only new ideals and practices but also new organizations, such as the French nursing orders. It also took advantage of the pre-existing hospitals to inculcate the new spirituality in the inmates.

The great merit of this book lies in its geographical coverage, which demonstrates how the Counter-Reformation was put into practice at different times and in different ways in different places. For instance, the trajectory of events in France is traced with great clarity by Colin Jones and...