CfP: Charity in Premodern Europe
The organizers invite contributions to a series of session on "Charity in Premodern Europe", which will take place at the 2027 meeting of the European Social Science History Conference, 21-24 April 2027, in Lyon France. The deadline for submissions is 13 April 2026.
These sessions invite scholars to consider the role of charitable organizations in the economy, society and culture of premodern Europe. Contributions should seek to place hospitals and other large-scale civic or regional charities in the broader context of the city or region in which they were located. How did their function affect commodity, housing, labor and/or money markets over time? How did their administrators, employees and residents enter into communal or social relations and, by so doing, alter them? How did charity as an ideal or value alter charity as a praxis? These sessions cast a wide net in the hope of provoking conversations across fields and encouraging reflection on the lived experience of charity.
Historians have long since agreed upon a master narrative for the transformation of charity from medieval and modern Europe. During the Middle Ages, charity was both deeply religious and highly personal. Beginning in the fourteenth century, a surge in the depth and breadth of poverty, which most scholars attribute to the corrosive effects of early capitalism, overwhelmed such resources as the medieval world possessed. The tide of need that washed over the countryside and flooded cityscapes altered attitudes toward poverty even as it transformed the practice of charity. The spiritual virtue of poverty and its relief supposedly diminished to the point of disappearance; the social purpose of charity moved from eleemosynary to disciplinary; the organizational framework of charity changed hands and forms. The established narrative that began with charity, then moved through poor relief to social welfare and finally – according to some scholars and applied to certain contexts – to effective altruism, had several consistent aspects: rationalization, secularization, bureaucratization.Other chronological accounts have identified distinct phases of heightened “rationalization” such as the early 16th century or the Enlightenment, attributing those to specific factors, such as the Protestant Reformation or the expanding absolutist state.
The influence of these Weberian tropes remains strong to this day. Recent historical studies have begun, however, to raise questions about what Max Weber understood to be an absolute divide between “the postulate of brotherly love” and “the loveless realities of the economic domain”. These have shown, for example, that the drive toward rationality began long before the fifteenth century or the rise of Evangelical Christianity, with which Weber initially associated it. Likewise, scholars now recognize that “the postulate of brotherly love” never entirely lost its force as an inspiration to aid the poor, even under the most rational, bureaucratic of circumstances. It seems increasingly clear that such over-simplified bipolarities no longer bear scrutiny. The poor are “always among us”, a fact that has inspired historians to explore how a moral framework remains a requirement for any effective response to an enduring problem.
These sessions invite contributions that explore the complex interaction of moral assumptions, socio-political forces and material processes. A growing body of work indicates that orphanages, hospitals, workhouses and asylums, to name but a few, could become major structures in local and regional economies, shaping their economic development over time. Another, related body of scholarship had examined how participation in charity, whether as donors or administrators, remained (and remains to this day) an essential, ‘strategic’ aspect of elite formation and, indeed, could serve the purposes of the powerful every bit as much as the needs of the powerless.
These session seek to weave these various strands of scholarship into a web of reflection. Archival transmission is still largely organized by institutional provenance, so contributions should accept the challenge of expanding their view beyond institutional constraints. Welcome are contributions that place charity in a broader context to show the complexity of its influence on communities and regions over time.
Proposals for contributions should be submitted to the conference via the “Social Inequality” link on its website, the URL for which is provided above, or to the organizers via email. Again, the deadline for submissions is 13 April 2026.
Thomas Max Safley, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA