Armut auf dem Lande: Mitteleuropa vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Poverty and poor relief in the countryside have long been stuck with the short end of the scholarly stick. Cities had a disproportionate amount of wealth with which to assist the needy, and even in the early modern period they were the place where the action was with regard to social reform; in addition, urban institutions left behind a far greater volume of written records for historians to plunder than their rural counterparts. This volume joins a growing body of literature that has undertaken to redress this historiographical imbalance for the period stretching from the late Middle Ages to the end of the old European agrarian order in the nineteenth century.

In the first substantive essay, Helmut Bräuer ponders the methodological problems involved in capturing the “mentality” (i.e., the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting) of the poor. Recovering their experience, Bräuer argues, requires combining an understanding of the ways in which the concrete social milieux inhabited by the poor, and the normative statements of the authorities, constrained the resources and life choices available to these persons, with an awareness of the ways in which these structural determinants were mediated by the intellectual and affective categories through which the individual attempted to make sense of his or her fate. Bräuer concludes that, all caveats notwithstanding, many of the sources used by the contributors to the volume, including petitions and “begging letters,” do provide faithful access to the mental world of the poor.

The next two chapters assay the geographical and social space inhabited by the itinerant poor. Gerhard Ammerer argues that the itinerant poor did, in fact, appropriate—if only provisionally and with limitations—the public and private spaces through which they moved, but that their spatial dispositions and practices of appropriation were tightly constrained by the available opportunities for satisfying their basic material needs. This appropriation, he maintains, was made possible by itinerants’ accumulation of practical knowledge about the best places to find alms and shelter and about those to avoid, such as roads and other spaces where the itinerant poor would be most vulnerable to the police. Ammerer suggests that the itinerant poor did develop a partial sense of belonging that was, to a certain degree, shared by the settled population.

Otto Ulbricht, for his part, challenges widespread claims regarding the social and moral marginalization of itinerant women beggars. He argues that the relatively low proportion of women among the itinerant population can be traced to the availability of gender-specific work in the countryside, but that women had to be mobile in order to avail themselves of such opportunities. While work provided one mechanism of social integration for the poor, Ulbricht argues that women whose circumstances forced them to beg occupied a recognized place within geographically bounded communities. He also describes the ways in which their gender inflected encounters between them and individual donors and local authorities. In the following essay, Sabine Veits-Falk similarly takes up the question of female poverty, but approaches the issue from a different perspective. She argues that the gendered virtues of subordination and self-sacrifice, which were constantly preached to the women of the rural underclasses, often contributed to the impoverishment of these serving women, who were then further disadvantaged in their quest for assistance by their failure to adhere to the very gender roles that had contributed to their misfortune in the first place.

The focus of the five essays that make up the second half of the book shifts from poverty to forms of assistance in the countryside. Sebastian Schmidt’s comparative look at poverty and poor relief in the English county of Essex concludes—not surprisingly—that the Elizabethan poor laws gave the English poor a greater sense of entitlement than was the case in central Europe. German communities also held to certain...