Almshouses

Poor relief and community building in Brussels, 1300-1640
This research presents a multi-layered perspective on poor relief in Brussels from 1300 to 1640. The central question is what kind of community people had in mind when organizing poor relief: who got access to certain help systems and who did not? I have made an overview of the diverse existing relief systems: hospitals, hospices, poor tables, confraternities, poor boxes etc. Then I focus on three specific aspects of community definition: membership requirements, regulations regarding origin and standards of behaviour. It appears that poor relief was made more rigid and exclusive earlier on and more bottom up than often presumed, particularly in private systems. Also, the idea of a civic community was more and more taking hold, albeit that other communities interfered.

L'assistance aux pauvres et la communauté à Bruxelles, 1300-1640
Cet article recherche les différents niveaux de l’assistance des pauvres à Bruxelles de 1300 à 1640. Quelle était la notion de communauté à la base de l’ organisation d'assistance des pauvres: qui y avait accès et qui n’y avait pas? J'ai fait un aperçu des systèmes de secours existants: hôpitaux, hospices, tables du Saint-Esprit, confréries, boîtes des métiers, etc. Puis, trois aspects spécifiques qui définissent la communauté sont traités: les conditions d’affiliation, le rôle de l’origine des individus et les normes de conduite . Il semble que l'assistance des pauvres a été rendue plus rigide et exclusive plus tôt et plus bottom up que souvent présumée, en particulier dans les systèmes privés. En outre, l'idée/la notion d'une communauté civique devenait de plus en plus importante, bien que des autres communautés influençaient ce processus .

Hospitals and alms-houses formed an important part of monastery’s charitable activities, the importance of which is emphasised at numerous points in the Rule of St Benedict and chapter 53 even begins with “Let all guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: “I was a stranger and you took Me in”. Charity however varied greatly from house to house with food, money and even clothing given frequently but with no real consistency between institutions. This paper discusses the siting of hospitals, as well as alms-houses, within the gatehouse complex of these institutions and offer explanations as to why they were placed here, and what purpose they served. Whether this location was merely one of convenience, or inherently linked with the ideals of the religious community is considered, drawing comparisons with other hospital sites.

"Review
“Addressing a long-neglected facet of the archaeology of our modern world—our institutions—this volume reveals the interesting and insightful past of a class of sites that are deeply and inextricably tied to a core aspect of modernity.”—Jamie C. Brandon, Arkansas Archeological Survey

Product Description
Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings. This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are eminently subject to archaeological investigation.  A few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.

CONTRIBUTORS: Sherene Baugher / April M. Beisaw / David R. Bush / Eleanor Conlin Casella / Lu Ann De Cunzo / Lois M. Feister / James G. Gibb / Owen Lindauer / Susan Piddock / Deborah L. Rotman / Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood / Stephen G. Warfel"

Merike Kurisoo. Vaene Laatsarus ja rikas mees. Kaks varauusaegset maali Tallinna Jaani seegist. - Tallinna Linnamuuseumi Toimetised 2 (2022), 232-243.
Summary: Poor Lazarus and the rich man. Two Early Modern paintings from St. John's almshouse in Tallinn.

German Merchants and a Witch in Cracow in 1642
Witchcraft beliefs were widespread in late medieval and early modern Cracow. Like elsewhere, the confidence in the effectiveness of magic was shared by people of various ethnic and religious denominations. The source edition that supplements this article is a testimony the Cracow merchant Adam Fister gave at the local justice at the behest of John Minen, a Danzig patrician, on 25 October 1642. Fister confirmed the account of the Cracovians: John Brauer, Mathew Erfort, Peter Rotenstein, and of the Viennese merchant Daniel Frans, that Casper Bekman, a merchant of  Lübeck had taken personal effects from Erfort that belonged to the Danzig tradesman. Then Bekman was putting a spell on Minen with the help of a hag whom he visited at the Spital Garden behind the city walls, near St Florian’s Gate. Bekman intended to make Minen return to Cracow. Brauer, who was a witness to those practices, implored Bekman to give up magic because it was an offence to God. He was successful in his persuasion.
The discussed source excerpt bears notice for several reasons. The witch demanded a relatively high fee of 200 florins, which shows a firm trust in her abilities. Deep into the eighteenth century, the Spital Garden was also known as the Lutheran Garden. Graves that were discovered there in 1837 were identified as Arian, that is of the local followers of Socinianism, although there were no grounds for such an interpretation. Thus, the nineteenth-century tradition of Arian Square, whose continuation today is Arian Street, is unjustified. In light of the discussed report, there is no doubt that the graves were part of the Cracow Lutherans’ cemetery, and, as often in such cases, the congregation had their spital, that is an almshouse, there. The Cracow merchants that are listed in the source must have belonged to the local Lutheran parish. Its members, we know next to nothing about, from 1636 met for services at the Calvinists’ chapel near Cracow. Fister mentioned Suzanne Mayerhöfer, the wife of an elder of the Reformed congregation, as one of the women who had seen Bekman and his German companion at the spital.

Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation ...

A autora deste livro é professora associada no Departamento de História da Universidade de Warwick, Reino Unido. Atualmente, os seus estudos incidem sobre a pobreza ao longo da Época Moderna em Inglaterra, debruçando-se especificamente sobre as almshouses.

The George S. Huntington anatomical collection is comprised of the skeletal remains of some 3600 immigrants and U.S.-born individuals. These persons died in public institutions, hospitals, and almshouses around New York City between 1893 and 1921. They were dissected as part of anatomical instruction at New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and subsequently became part of the doctor’s comparative skeletal collection.
Scholars who study similar skeletal series—e.g., from almshouses and other public institutions—tend to interpret skeletal data in relation to the “biology of poverty.” That is, scholars categorically treat individuals in such assemblages as “the poor.” Instead, I take an intersectional approach and focus on “elderly” Ireland-born women in the collection, exploring the relations between gender, class, citizenship, disability, and age.  Understandings of old age and the life course were in flux at the turn of the century. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped communities, kinship, and notions of utility and productivity, affecting notions of aging and the aged body. This paper explores the embodied experience of aging in the Huntington collection in relation to discourses of aging in America. In particular, I consider how the skeletal remains and textual sources of the Huntington individuals challenge the simple ways in which immigrants––aging in public institutions––might be categorically understood as able or debilitated.

Now land-locked, lying two miles from the sea, throughout the medieval period Rye fulfilled a significant role as a seaport, in tandem with Winchelsea. When Winchelsea collapsed, Rye experienced growth in population and prosperity. By the 16th century, Rye was a packed and bustling town with a vibrant community and many of its houses were rebuilt. This volume, the companion to Rye: a History of a Sussex town to c.1660,  is a study of the town's built heritage: houses, walls, gates, friaries, hospital, grammar school, alms-house and parish church.

In this paper we describe a novel multi-agent architecture consisting of two remotely (geographically dispersed) associated intelligent environments aimed at establishing an agentbased care system. We will introduce the careAgents joint project, in which a collection of heterogeneous building and robotic embedded agents intelligently learns and cooperates to care for human occupants. We will show how our agent architecture facilitates inter-agent communication and how this system can be used to detect abnormalities from normal.. ...

The Warwick History Postgraduate Conference (University of Warwick, 2019).

The increase in poverty, and the social problems surrounding it, are a common theme of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century social history. In the late fifteenth century royal government introduced new measures to tackle the problem of poverty and begging. The issue continued to hold the attention of government and, from the mid sixteenth century, their measures began to use the parish as the administrative unit for managing central government poor relief policy. Marjorie McIntosh has written much on the changes in the formal role of parishes in poor relief in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her approach considers poor relief largely as an institution-led movement.

This paper uses testamentary evidence from Reading to investigate how the grassroots participation of inhabitants adapted across time. The mid sixteenth century brought major changes to the pattern of piety, resulting not only from government policy on poor relief itself but from wider religious policy. The evidence reveals a number of features. Firstly, poor relief was practised by parishioners long before it became a statutory duty of parishes, taking a bottom-up form rather than an institution-led form. Secondly, as provision for intercession declined, that of poor relief increased. Thirdly, poor relief was not simply a case of the wealthiest in society supporting the poorest. In fact, where poverty was greatest in Reading, much support came from the less wealthy parishioners as well as the social elite.