Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe: Complexities, Contradictions, Transformations, c. 1100-1500

264 Pages·2016·1.272 MB·English

by  Sharon Ann Farmer

Approaches to Poverty
in Medieval Europe
INTERNATIONAL MEDIEVAL RESEARCH
Editorial Board
Axel E. W. Müller, University of Leeds — Executive Editor
John B. Dillon, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Richard K. Emmerson, Manhattan College, New York
Christian Krötzl, University of Tampere
Chris P. Lewis, University of London
Pauline Stafford, University of Leeds / University of Liverpool
with the assistance of the IMC Programming Committee
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 22
Approaches to Poverty
in Medieval Europe
Complexities, Contradictions,
Transformations, c. 1100–1500
Edited by
Sharon Farmer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2016/0095/37
ISBN: 978-2-503-55547-8
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-56206-3
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction
SHARON FARMER 1
Hospitals, Charity, and the Culture of Compassion
in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
ADAM J. DAVIS 23
Impoverished Free Litigants in Thirteenth-Century Property Disputes
JANICE MUSSON 47
R. Eliezer of Metz’s Twelfth-Century Exclusion from Charity
of the Jewish Avaryan B’mezid (‘Deliberate Transgressor’)
ALySSA M. GRAy 67
From Saint Francis to Salimbene di Adam:
Begging in the Early Franciscan World, c. 1210–80
ALLISON EDGREN 93
Temptation and the Medi eval Italian Inquisition
JILL MOORE 117
Rich and Poor in Western Europe, c. 1375–1475:
The Political Paradox of Material Well-Being
SAMUEL K. COHN JR 145
vi Contents
The Almoina of Barcelona during the Catalan Civil War (1462–72):
Changes and Continuities in the Conception of
Catholic Poor Relief in Late Medi eval Europe
POL SERRAHIMA I BALIUS 175
Rich Master, Poor Master: The Economic Standing
of Schoolteachers in Late Medi eval France
SARAH B. LyNCH 207
The Poor and their Power: Images of Poor Women
in Medi eval Literature and Art
ANNE M. SCOTT 229
List of Illustrations
Tables
Table 7.1., p. 185. Revenues and Expenses during Pre-War Period (1451–1459)
Table 7.2., p. 194. Revenues and Expenses During the War (1461–1473)
Maps
Map 7.1, p. 186. Location of the Possessions of the Pia Almoina in Catalonia.
Map 7.2, p. 193. The Effects of War on the Possessions of the Pia Almoina.
Figures
Figure 9.1, p. 235. Mystical Marriage of St. Francis and Lady Poverty, Assisi,
Lower Church.
Figure 9.2, p. 243. ‘Poverty Overwhelms Fortune’, Miniature by the Master of
the Cité des dames, Paris c. 1420, BL Royal 20 C IV fol.77v.

Introduction
Sharon Farmer
The essays in this volume — which draw on a variety of sources from
England, France, the Low Countries, Italy, and Iberia — grew out of
papers that were presented within the auspices of the special thematic
strand, ‘Poor… Rich’, of the 2011 International Medi eval Congress at the Uni-
ver sity of Leeds. While the thematic strand lent itself to a broad range of topics,
from ‘conspicuous consumption and magnificence’ to ‘vagrancy and homeless-
ness’, the essays that were selected for this volume focus on the poor end of
the spectrum (including both the involuntary and the voluntary poor) and on
secular and religious responses to the poor.
Historiographical Background
Anyone who chooses, in the twenty-first century, to write about the history of
medieval poverty and the medieval poor builds on foundations that were laid
by the French scholar Michel Mollat (1911–96) and by the Polish scholar and
politician Bronislaw Geremek (1932–2008). The two scholars drew on each
other’s work, but they also developed notably different perspectives, especially
concerning the role of the Christian religion in shaping attitudes towards the
poor; Geremek, moreover, carried his analysis across a much broader period of
time, seeking, in his discussion of medieval poverty, to trace the roots of cer-
tain early modern and modern European attitudes towards and classifications
of the poor.
Sharon Farmer ([email protected]) is Professor of History at the Univ ers ity of Cal i-
fornia, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the social history of medieval France.
Approaches to Poverty in Medieval Europe: Complexities, Contradictions, Transformations,
c. 1100–1500, ed. by Sharon Farmer, IMR 22 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) pp. 1–22
BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.IMR-EB.5.105457
2 Sharon Farmer
For over a decade, beginning in 1962, Mollat’s seminar on the history of
medieval poverty spawned scores of publications by dozens of scholars on the
subjects of medieval poverty and charity, governmental responses to the poor,
and religious attitudes towards the poor.1 That work culminated, in 1971, in
Mollat’s joint publication, with Philippe Wolfe, of a study of popular protest
movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Ongles bleus, Jacques et
Ciompi: les révolutions populaires en Europe aux xive et xve siècles, published in
English in 1973 as Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages; and, in 1978,
in Mollat’s monumental work Les pauvres au Moyen Âge, which appeared in
English in 1986 as The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History.
As Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, recently pointed out, for over three decades Mollat
and Wolfe’s Popular Revolutions remained the only attempt at a truly compara-
tive study of late medieval protest movements.2 Similarly, Mollat’s monograph
on the medieval poor, which drew on evidence from every part of Western
Europe, and much of Eastern Europe as well, created an enduring scholarly
consensus concerning the basic contours of the history of poverty within medi-
eval European Christian society.
In the early medieval Christian West, Mollat suggested, virtually the only
organized charitable responses to the plight of the poor came from the church
— first its bishops, and then its monks.3 That era was followed by a ‘revolu-
tion in charity’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which saw an outpour-
ing of royal, noble, and bourgeois generosity, resulting in an explosion of new
foundations of charitable institutions and in other caritative acts.4 Then, for the
fourteenth and fifteen centuries, Mollat (who drew here on some of Geremek’s
work) painted a picture of increasing levels of poverty and vagrancy (brought
about by war, famine, and plague) followed by greater statutory efforts to
‘police the poor’ by freezing wage levels and outlawing vagabondage.5 Such cir-
cumstances were made even worse, Mollat argued, because charitable efforts to
ameliorate the plight of the poor met with increasing challenges, as endowed
1 Some of those articles were published in Mollat, Études sur l’histoire de la pauvreté. Other
articles that grew out of the seminar were listed at the end of volume ii of that collection.
2 Cohn, Lust for Liberty, p. 3.
3 Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. by Goldhammer, pp. 38–53.
4 Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. by Goldhammer, pp. 87–157. He uses the
expression ‘revolution in charity’ on p. 135, citing Vauchez, ‘Charité et pauvreté’.
5 Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. by Goldhammer, pp. 191–293. The influence
of Geremek’s work is especially apparent at pp. 290–93, which draw on Geremek, ‘La lutte
contre le vagabondage à Paris’.