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1 - Discipline, Community, and the Sixteenth-Century Origins of Modern Poor Relief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2009

Larry Frohman
Larry Frohman
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Stony Brook
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Summary

The history of poor relief in the Germanies is coextensive with that of the modern world. This history began in the second half of the 1400s with the desacralization of almsgiving and the subsequent emergence of begging and vagrancy as distinct social problems, and the attitudes toward poverty and the institutions that were established in the 1500s to relieve it defined the basic framework of assistance to the needy until the first decades of the twentieth century.

During the Middle Ages, material destitution was an unavoidable fact for a substantial proportion of the population; begging was an accepted way of holding body and soul together; charity for the poor played an essential role in the Christian economy of salvation; and beggars occupied a recognized, if subordinate, place in the complex skein of social hierarchies that made up the fabric of medieval society. However, things began to change after 1450 or so. The desacralization of almsgiving reflected a growing recognition that not all beggars could be considered the proper object of Christian charity. This new attitude meant that Christian charity would have to become more systematic and discriminating and that it would have to make greater efforts to distinguish between those who were truly deserving of charity and those who would simply be encouraged in their wicked ways by such assistance. It also meant that charity would become the object of public policy in ways that it had never been before.

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Poor Relief and Welfare in Germany from the Reformation to World War I , pp. 11 - 31
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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