Hospitals and Charity: Religious Culture and Civic Life in Medieval Northern Italy

Originally intended to house pilgrims and comfort the dying, hospitals in medieval Italy evolved from religious institutions reflecting communal and personal piety to civic facilities providing comprehensive social welfare and medical services to the urban community. At the same time, they became a means for the new urban elites to acquire political power and social status. In Hospitals and charity, Sally Brasher provides the first comprehensive examination of the founding of small independent hospitals throughout the region. Beginning in the twelfth century, she considers the challenges to establishing and managing these hospitals in the face of ecclesiastical and political interference over the succeeding three hundred years. The charitable institutions that emerged reflected a nexus of lay initiative, religious culture and civic political life. Though their independent nature makes generalisation difficult, Brasher assembles evidence from over 175 hospitals covering a wide geographic and chronological expanse to create a picture of the internal life of the institutions and their place within the urban community. In so doing, she provides a new framework for understanding the rise of the central civic hospital in the fifteenth century, a phenomenon that has generally been seen as a particular product of the Renaissance. Hospitals and charity will be of interest to students and researchers of medieval social, religious and urban history.