Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg, and: Abandoned Children of the Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (review)

Passionate in their quest to understand the inner worlds of orphans and of those who purported to care for them, the authors of these two studies portray with verve and imagination the specific contours of urban solidarity that sustained early modern orphanages. By Terpstra's account, the orphans of well established citizens took priority in the attentions of the members of urban elites of Florence and Bologna, whether they acted as individual donors, agents of guilds, or public magistrates. Enactment of measures to serve large numbers of the indigent of lower social status served a complementary function in Bologna, relieving the more specialized institutions of the need to attend to the mass of the chronically destitute (Florence belatedly followed a similar course). In Augsburg, the clientele of the three orphanages (Catholic, Lutheran, municipal) depicted by Safley appears to have been more homogeneous, but the criteria for admission evinced a similar desire to preserve the status of productive artisans already integrated into the urban social hierarchy. All three cities also had foundling homes devoted to the recovery of newborn infants, notably the capacious Ospedale degli Innocenti founded in Florence in 1410.

Thomas Safley's work is a sequel to his earlier study, Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997), in which he traced the institutional history of the city's three orphanages in the context of economic activity. There he also examined the effects of sectarian allegiances and municipal identity in an Imperial City where Lutherans and Catholics roughly coexisted through shifts in their military and political ascendancy. As editor of a volume entitled The Reformation of Charity: the Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (Boston, 2003) Safley provided a thoughtful introductory synthesis on this complex subject. In the work reviewed here, he focuses singlemindedly on the "Orphan Books" of the city's Alms Office, with the aim of grounding the history of the orphanages in the experience of the inmates insofar as that experience may be gleaned from the records. He opens every chapter with one or more illustrative cases and seizes on any report of the orphans' own words in order to see institutional practice through their eyes. At the same time, the case records reveal the decision-making processes of the directors and the magistrates who oversaw them. Returning to the questions raised in his earlier book, he probes more extensively the rationale for institutional practice.

Safley argues throughout that the governors of Augsburg's orphanages pursued the goal of social integration based on the capacity and will of each citizen to maintain a respectable sufficiency in his or her social station, a concept expressed in the German term Nahrung. The degree to which the poorer segments of society reciprocated with a commitment to behave in a manner calculated to achieve that level of security and integration forms a counterpoint to the motivations of the leading citizens. In distributing the charitable resources at their disposal, the governors weighed the likelihood that the support they gave would set their charges on the road to honorable self-sufficiency. According to statutes laid down in the sixteenth century, only children who had lost both parents and who had no relatives who could care for them were eligible to enter, but Safley finds that "half orphans" were often admitted as a means of preventing both the child and the single parent from falling into misery. In another instance of flexibility, governors strictly enforced the obligation of relatives to step in only in lean years when the resources of the orphanages were stretched.

Invoking alternative models of social psychology to describe the behavior and motivations of the urban poor and governing elites, Safley insists...