Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg.

Thomas M. Safley. Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg.

Studies in Central European Histories. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. xvi + 494 pp. index. illus. tbls. map. bibl. $129. ISBN: 0-391-04224-6.

This study is a sequel to the author's Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (1997). That earlier work linked the orphanages' domestic economy to the emergence of capitalistic practices and values. Safley focuses here upon the fortunes of the orphans themselves, using the institutions' records to reconstruct the activities of over 5,700 young people in the city's care between 1572 and 1806. Numerous Urgichten criminal proceedings (unfortunately omitted from the bibliography) and marriage, tax, and testament records supplement the imposing statistical analysis.

The first of three lengthy sections explores the circumstances that forced families to consign their children to the care of the city. Augsburg's large community of weavers formed a permanent underclass that was constantly vulnerable to shifting pressures in the European cloth markets, especially as the city's influence declined after the early seventeenth century. In several extended examples, Safley illustrates a fragile network of odd jobs, loans, and neighborhood ties that sustained many of the poor. Death of a parent or a family's collapse under debt could force the separation of siblings into relatives' households or temporary support by the Alms Office. Adaptation within such domestic economies, Safley argues, was the product of calculated behavior and should not be dismissed as a remnant of traditional society that lay outside the emerging capitalist economy.

For many children and adolescents, the responses to poverty included months or years in the orphanage, the focus of the book's second section. Although conditions in the facilities were harrowing--overall, about 40% of the admittees died--Safley focuses on the efforts to provide orphans with practical skills and social competency (Nahrung). This education included attention not only to skills but to the clock. Safley argues that the orphanage offered "an indoctrination in time discipline" of the kind that historians such as E. P. Thompson have associated with a later period (265). The regimen of chores and training also inspired extensive traffic between the facilities and local tradespeople, as orphans were hired out to learn weaving, shoemaking, and tailoring. But the discipline that orphanage administrators strove to enforce was never complete. Some orphans fled, supplemented meager possessions with petty theft, and occasionally rebelled. Several colorful narratives--of young Friderich Miller, who claimed to dance with the devil, or roguish Wolf Alber, who was whipped through the streets--enliven the account, even if they do not always illuminate the prosaic search for livelihood that is the book's central theme.

The final section addresses life after the orphanage, when the majority of girls entered domestic service and the boys chose apprenticeships with craftsmen. About three-quarters of the orphans who were placed outside the facility successfully entered a career and the vast majority also remained in Augsburg. However, the vast majority of apprentices also did not follow the trades of their parents. They were thus an important source of social mobility within the city economy, even if their overall status seldom exceeded that of their previous family. In this section, and the book as a whole, Safley's statistics themselves offer a range of intriguing questions. For example, the city's biconfessional orphanage, in operation between 1572 and 1648, admitted roughly the same number of boys and girls. But, for reasons that are undetermined, after parallel Catholic and Lutheran orphanages replaced the municipal facility in 1653 the male/female ratio of admittees often fluctuated dramatically.

Throughout the work, Safley emphasizes that poor individuals acted resourcefully, and were products neither of a hidebound traditional mentality nor a nascent capitalist rationalism. Few will disagree with this thesis, but the book's wealth of statistical data for these institutions is not matched by an equally thorough account of their significance. Safley asserts that no other orphanages have been found that pursued similar goals (262, n.). However, in the absence of any substantive discussion of comparable institutions, the claim is questionable. Certainly the Francke Orphanage at Halle, which ran a school for the poor after 1710, combined religious instruction and practical education in a model that was emulated elsewhere.

Any broader study of early modern orphan care, or poor relief in general, should take account of Safley's analysis. For more general readers, this local study offers an admirably thorough description of the structures of poverty and the many individuals who overcame them.

MITCHELL LEWIS HAMMOND

University of Victoria