CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS with welfare and social policy have led scholars to become interested in the study of poverty and the poor in western Europe during the Middle Ages. The result of this attention has been a growing bibliography that has focused on the history of medieval social policy and of the institutions created to implement a strategy of poor relief. This study seeks to refine our understanding of this history by exploring the pivotal role played by religion and religious institutions in the creation, evolution, and sustenance of the myriad of hospitals, leprosaria, almshouses, orphanages, and confraternal and parochial charities...

RELIGIOUS CHARITY was not just a set of institutions; it also encompassed an ideology that describes a distinctive vision of the Christian life in the Middle Ages. As an expression of Christian spirituality, the love of neighbor has been often overlooked, ignored, or else undervalued by historians of the Christian Middle Ages. Modern writers have long studied the religious paths of the monk and friar and acknowledged their significance as representatives of medieval religious values and as windows into society’s spiritual mentalité. Barbara Rosenwein and Lester Little, for example, have argued that monasticism represents rural society’s admiration of patience and...

THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES gave birth to the ancestor of the modern hospital. While, for much of this period, the term hospital is to be understood by its root meaning—that is, as a place of shelter rather than a locus of care—every town and many villages and rural locales came to possess one or more of these institutions. The initiative for their foundation can be attributed to no single segment of medieval society, for we can count among their benefactors, bishops, cathedral chapters, monasteries and religious orders, and pious laypeople, as well as religious, professional, and municipal associations....

JUST AS bishops, monasteries, and lay patrons were laying the foundations for almshouses, hospices, and leper shelters across Europe, groups of men and women coalesced into religious communities for the pursuit of a caritative apostolate. Some of these individuals established religious orders, groupings of affiliated houses and communities joined together under a shared Rule to fulfill a common mission. Most prominent among these were the military orders, many of whom operated shelters and hospitals in addition to their better-known combat activities in Spain, Palestine, and eastern Europe. Less visible were smaller orders who guarded mountain passes through the Alps or...

THE tradition of hospitality, heretofore limited to the monastery and the cathedral church, became institutionalized in the twelfth century. Among the earliest exemplars, as we have seen, were members of military orders and bridge brotherhoods, whose work of protecting pilgrims led them also to care for the sick, disabled, and aged. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were others who shared these same concerns for travelers and so went on to establish the first purely hospitaller orders. Some, such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, shared with the military orders an association with crusading but, as ransomers, had to eschew...

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS charity sketched thus far has focused upon the caritative endeavors of clergy and those under the discipline of religious life. Prosperous laypeople, as we have seen, also figured as the founders and patrons of particular charitable houses. Indeed, all lay folk were encouraged and even obligated to support works of charity within their communities. Yet, in the institutions studied so far, the clergy were preeminent as the supervisors, administrators, and practitioners of charity. Was the role of the great majority of the community then a passive one? Some historians have seen this to be precisely the...

MANY OF THOSE who served the poor in almshouses and hospitals did so as professed members of religious communities. Although Benedictines, both men and women, had long given alms to the poor and practiced other forms of charity, the religious of the hospital are of a different sort. Traditional monks, for example, were called upon to undergo a martyrdom of the flesh, while, as Jacques de Vitry argues, hospitallers suffered a martyrdom of service. Unlike monks, who were called to the contemplative life, hospitallers led active lives within the secular world and so followed the less restrictive Rule of St....

BEFORE THE fifteenth century, only the most precocious of hospitals articulated for patients a fixed regimen of medical care. Prior to that time, most aspired merely to shelter their guests and, depending upon circumstances, to provide a modicum of palliative care that usually included a basic diet, clean bed, fresh dressings for sores and wounds, and perhaps herbal remedies. Pilgrim hospices, by providing a secure place for travelers to overnight in a strange land, most directly contributed to the preservation of life. But other hospitals, those that tended to the sick and the chronically ill, were as much a locus...

THE INTENT of the foreging seven chapters has been to sketch the nature, characteristics, and evolution of medieval religious charity and its various components. We began with the obligation to give, an idea rooted in the very bedrock of Christianity, which received new shape and iteration in the writings of Innocent III and the reform generation of the early thirteenth century. The theoretical demands of charity, furthermore, were given practical expression in the myriad of shelters, almshouses, hospices, hospitals, and leprosaria that date from as early as the fourth century. The urban renaissance of the twelfth century, however, gave a...