Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Note on currency
- Introduction
- PART ONE CASTILE AND THE RELIEF OF THE POOR
- 1 Castilian legislation, debates and innovations
- 2 The reform of charitable institutions
- PART TWO POVERTY AND WELFARE IN TOLEDO
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - The reform of charitable institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Note on currency
- Introduction
- PART ONE CASTILE AND THE RELIEF OF THE POOR
- 1 Castilian legislation, debates and innovations
- 2 The reform of charitable institutions
- PART TWO POVERTY AND WELFARE IN TOLEDO
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE TRIDENTINE REFORMS
Throughout the last third of the sixteenth century, the hospitals of Castile were subjected to a continual barrage of reforms. Incentive for one reform movement was fostered by the hospital decrees of the Tridentine legislation which urged episcopal supervision of the services, expenditures and administrators of charitable institutions. Before the Council of Trent the jurisdictional status of hospitals, like that of most institutions pertaining to poor relief, was vague and uncertain. On the one hand hospitals were frequently founded, administered and paid for by laymen, either as individuals or as members of a confraternity or a municipality, facts which lent support to those who maintained that hospitals were secular institutions subject to the control of secular authorities. On the other hand, even the smallest hospice possessed an altar and the larger hospitals usually boasted a full-scale church, facts which placed the institutions in the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical authorities.
Consider, for example, the hospital at the Escorial, founded by Philip II in the early 1570s to treat the workmen who laboured to erect the eighth wonder of Christendom, as well as any poor persons in need of hospital care. The lengthy constitutions for this thirty-bed hospital were studied and amended by the most eminent men of Castile, including the king, so they might be taken as the last word in the goals of Castilian hospital service.
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- Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain , pp. 45 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1983