Charity and Power in Early Modern Italy: Benefactors and Their Motives in Turin, 1541-1789.

In this carefully-argued revisionist work, Cavallo challenges conventional wisdom regarding the development of poor relief in Turin through the early modern period. Local histories explained institutional poor relief as examples of an increasingly enlightened absolutism. Cavallo outlines a far more nuanced process that takes into account successive conflicts between the city and the court (1540s-1620s), between groups within the elite (1620s-1720s), and between the royal bureaucrats and the administrators and patrons of traditional charitable institutions (1720s-1789).

The book opens with a 1541 plan to reform poor relief along lines familiar from other European cities: regular surveys to distinguish worthy from unworthy and local from "foreign" poor, with alms for the needy and banishment for the rest. Cavallo discounts both the intellectual impetus provided by humanist works such as Vives's De subventione pauperum and the demographic impetus provided by expanding populations; more pointedly, she discounts the notion that these sixteenth-century "reforms" were new. They had medieval antecedents, and their early modern revival had more to do with political consolidation than with a new concern for either efficiency or the poor. In Turin, the city council led the effort as a means of establishing its civic, religious, and charitable authority vis a vis both the occupying French and the absent archbishops. These assertions gave the council significant bargaining power with the dukes upon their return in 1563, so much so that the dukes established rival charitable institutions in efforts to outflank it. Ducal efforts were unsuccessful before the 1620s, and the council's power did not begin to fade until the 1650s.

Under council administration, charity was a civic duty. Large numbers of people gave small amounts of alms which the council dispensed as food, money, or medical help. Existing hospitals were small and enclosure was not widely practiced; on the whole, Cavallo believes that the importance of Renaissance hospitals has been overrated, and that far more charity was distributed outside than through them. This began to change in the mid-seventeenth century, when wealthy elites excluded from the court aristocracy used charitable patronage to assert their own wealth and standing. Charity became more personalized as givers singled out particular causes and demanded particular honors: memorial busts and plaques, requiems, prayers, and funerary processions of the poor. The number of donors declined but the size of donations soared; much of this money under-wrote new hospitals whose baroque architecture and prominent locations contributed to their donor's aggrandizement.

Women's charitable giving was similarly personalized, though usually on a far smaller scale. Beyond funding dowries and shelters for others, they expanded convents which might house their kin or, during devotional retreats or in widowhood, themselves. Women made thirty percent of all bequests in the 1690s, but lost ground as laws enforcing primogeniture and expanding husbands' control over assets took hold. Women's charitable strategies began to move more in line with those of their husband's families while, at the same time, those family strategies took on some of the more privatized characteristics which women had demonstrated.

This occurred from the 1730s, when hospitals gradually lost their lay character and became state bureaucracies, supplemented with a new range of disciplinary institutions whose strict enclosure, penal architecture, and workhouse organization aimed to employ those young adults who were being left behind in a declining economy. The declining economy and state bureaucratization also threatened the elites, who responded by further privatizing charity, earmarking funds for institutions and causes which would help their kin, their clients, and themselves.

As the subtitle indicates, this is not a study that aims to get some statistical grasp on the sources or extent of poverty. It focuses on the distributors rather than the recipients of poor relief, attempting to understand how donors' circumstances shaped their charity. It contributes to the ongoing redefinition of "absolutism" and gives a more coherent view of civic poor relief than most institutionally-focused histories offer. Cavallo is perhaps too reductionist when assessing the reasons behind sixteenth-century reforms, and does not adequately recognize that Turin's reliance on outdoor relief rather than hospitals may be a simple consequence of its size. Yet she offers intelligent insights about class, politics, and poor relief that are applicable to other Renaissance cities, both in Italy and beyond.

NICHOLAS TERPSTRA Luther College, University of Regina