Table Of ContentPoverty and Prosperity
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance
Volume
General Editor
Robert E. Bjork
Poverty and Prosperity
in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
edited by
Cynthia Kosso
Anne Scott
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Poverty and prosperity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. -- (Arizona
studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ; 19)
1. Poor--History--Congresses.
2. Charity--History-- Congresses.
3. Poverty--Religious aspects--Congresses.
4. Elite (Social sciences)--Attitudes--Congresses.
5. Poverty in literature--Congresses.
6. Wealth in literature--Congresses.
7. Charity in literature-- Congresses.
8. Charity--Political aspects--Congresses.
I. Series II. Kosso, Cynthia. III. Scott, Anne, 1958-
305.5’09-dc23
ISBN-13: 9782503530321
© 2012 BREPOLS
Printed on acid-free paper
D/2012/0095/74
ISBN 978–2–503–53032-1
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
anne scott and cynthia kosso
Part I: Poverty and Morality
Model Rulers and Royal Misers: Public Morality among the 3
Merovingian Aristocracy
alicia mckenzie
Living on Loss: Poverty and Wealth in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 25
roy neil graves
A Sham, Pretense, and Hypocrisy? Poverty in The Book of Concord of 1580 55
jayson s. galler
Promiscuous Monks and Naughty Nuns: Poverty, Sex, and Apostasy in 75
Later Medieval England
christian d. knudsen
Part II: Charity and Almsgiving
Approaching Poverty in the Medieval Countryside 95
phillipp r. schofield
From Caritas to Charity: How Loving God Became Giving Alms 113
eliza buhrer
The Bonds of Charity: Charitable and Liturgical Obligations in 129
Bolognese Testaments
matthew t. sneider
Poverty and Charity: Jews in the Medieval Islamic World 143
mark r. cohen
The Voice of the Poor and the Tin Ear of Nineteenth-Century 155
English Medievalism
charles w. connell
vi Contents
Part III: Spirituality and Institutional Organizations
Comparing Spiritual and Material Goods: Poverty and Prosperity in 179
The Pilgrimage of the Soul and Everyman
rosemarie mcgerr
Innocent IV, John XXII, and the Michaelists on Corporate Poverty 197
jonathan robinson
Traders, Vagabonds, Incarnate Christs, and Pilgrims: The Religious 225
Network of Danilo Filippov, 1650–1850
j. eugene clay
The Poor, the Secular Courts, and Access to Justice in 241
Thirteenth-Century France
ada-maria kuskowski
Part IV: Monetary and Literary Economies and Greed
Rich or Poor? Alfred’s Prose Boethius and the Poetic Economy of 259
Anglo-Saxon Exposition
tiffany beechy
Wealth, Weber, and Whig Historiography: Reading George Herbert’s 279
“Business”
ron cooley
The Economy of the Turnip: Contributions of the Rapularius to the 293
Medieval Debate on Greed
sally livingston
Ferocious Appetites: Hunger, Nakedness, and Identity in Sixteenth-Century 303
American Encounters
heather martel
Notes on Contributors 323
Index 327
Introduction
This book incorporates the results of the twelfth annual Arizona Center for Medi-
eval and Renaissance Studies conference, on “Poverty and Prosperity, the Rich and
the Poor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” held in Tempe, Arizona, in Febru-
ary 2006. The papers given at the conference disseminated an impressive amount of
historical, art historical, literary, material, and theoretical research. This selection
of essays, now revised and expanded, and including some work from scholars who
did not attend the conference, offers researchers, teachers, and students a new basis
for understanding poverty and prosperity from the Middle Ages through the Early
Modern period.
Happily, the topics of poverty and prosperity in these eras have not been
neglected: social, intellectual, cultural, and economic historians as well as literary
scholars and archeologists have all contributed to our understanding of the nature
and function of poverty and prosperity, the causes underlying both, the relationship
between the two, the manner in which writers and thinkers have represented these
concepts, and remedies to help those in need. The volumes comprising the Cam-
bridge Economic History of Europe, for example, originally published in the 1940s,
continue to be revised, with newly-edited volumes having appeared from the 1960s
on. 1 Michel Mollat’s The Poor in the Middle Ages also stands as a compendium of
information, carefully interpreted, concerning everything from almsgiving, char-
ity, and famines to slavery, taxation, and rural poverty; 2 another book-length study
frames the issue of prosperity through a study of property and property relations
1 The volumes are discussed by Georges Duby, “The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages,”
Economic History Review n. s. 56 (2003): 159. The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages is also the title
of the second revised edition of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe vol. 1, ed. M. M. Postan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). For a new version of the Cambridge Economic
History of Europe’s foundational predecessor, please see the Cambridge Economic History of the
Greco-Roman World, ed. W. Scheidel et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2 Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Gold-
hammer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
Poverty and Prosperity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. by Cynthia Kosso and Anne Scott,
ASMAR 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. vii–xxiv.
FHG DOI 10.1484/M.ASMAR-EB.1.101052
viii Introduction
across several centuries. 3 In addition, recent scholars have explored, in the con-
text of the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, poverty and its relationship to
urbanization, voluntary poverty as a function of religious reform, the evidence of
prosperity gleaned through material culture, the contribution of disease to poverty,
strategies for prosperity within certain geographical regions, metaphorical wealth
or its opposite, and the gendered expressions of poverty and prosperity. 4 A recent
(2008) conference at Cornell University on the subject of poverty in the Middle
Ages attests, as well, to the importance of this topic from an interdisciplinary per-
spective. 5 It stands to reason that the multitude of ways in which we represent and
have discussed wealth or its absence; the myriad conditions that make us either rich
or poor, prosperous or impoverished; and the ways in which we have maintained the
better condition or have ameliorated the worse have captured our imaginations and
intellect, as they continue to do today. 6
Interestingly, such studies on the topic of poverty and prosperity have thrived
despite difficulties in either amassing appropriate information on the subject or
understanding this information correctly. Medieval and Early Modern scholars are
quick to acknowledge that statistics regarding either state or human conditions are
3 Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998).
4 Robert C. Allen, “Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe,” Economic History
Review n. s. 56 (2003): 403–43; Michael Bailey, “Religious Poverty, Mendicancy, and Reform
in the Late Middle Ages,” Church History 72 (2003): 457–83; Kathy Cawsey, “Tutivillus and
the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages,” Studies in Philology 102 (2005):
434–51; David Hinton, “Expressions of the Elites” and “Material Culture and Social Display,” in
Gold and Gilt, Pots and Pins: Possessions and People in Medieval Britain (Oxford: University Press,
2005), 39–74 and 206–32 respectively; Henrietta Leyser, “Women at Work,” in Medieval Women:
A Social History of Women in England 450–1500 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); 142–67;
Barbara Logue, “In Pursuit of Prosperity: Disease and Death in a Massachusetts Commercial
Port, 1660–1850,” Journal of Social History 25 (1991): 309–43; David Nicholas, “Of Poverty and
Primacy: Demand, Liquidity, and the Flemish Economic Miracle, 1050–1200,” American His-
torical Review 96 (1991): 17–41; Patricia Skinner, “Gender and Poverty in the Medieval Commu-
nity,” in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1997), 204–21; and Robert Tittler, “Late Medieval Urban Prosperity,” Economic History
Review, n. s. 37 (1984): 551–54. The truly pioneering study was that of Evelyne Patlagean, Pau-
vreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance (Paris: Mouton, 1977).
5 We are grateful to Paul Hyams of Cornell University for directing us to the conference
website — http://www.arts.cornell.edu/medieval/News/archive/poverty.htm — as well as for
putting us in touch with several persons who eventually contributed to this volume.
6 See David Nicholas, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” in Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages
[hereafter ODMA], ed. R. E. Bjork et al., 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3:
1351–52.
Introduction ix
hard to come by, and when statistics are found, they can be challenging to interpret
or even misleading. 7
Barbara Logue notes the difficulties in understanding mortality statistics for
the port city of Nantucket in the seventeenth century because death registration
“was far from complete [. . .] and [therefore] unreliable.” 8 Owing to the paucity of
references to women in medieval documents, Patricia Skinner also remarks on the
challenges of establishing a standard of poverty for women. 9 When statistics are
available on poverty or prosperity, these statistics can lead to false conclusions about
the nature of these two conditions, encouraging one to formulate “generalizations”
based on statistical analyses that “violate local observations.” 10 Such is the case with
erroneous assumptions drawn from interpretations of medieval Byzantine legisla-
tion to aid the poor. When looked at more carefully, as Rosemary Morris has done,
this legislation “apparently protecting the poor had very little to do with actual
concern for that group,” since the poor remained poor, but rather it concerned itself
with “limit[ing] the political ambitions of the emperors’ most powerful subjects
by promoting the interests of humbler groups.” 11 By examining the building of
town halls in the fifteenth century in medieval England, Robert Tittler cautions us,
in addition, against assuming that such town-hall construction implied economic
growth and prosperity, given the fact that an “apparent hiatus” of such building in
the latter half of the fifteenth century seems to correspond to the most complete
evidence of major borough incorporations — an irony that leads to “an illogical situ-
ation if one attributes both activities to the same cause.” 12
Regardless of, or despite, these issues, however, research on the topics of pov-
erty and prosperity in the Middle Ages through Early Modern period is wonder-
fully varied and nuanced. This fact has helped us assemble and make sense of a
multitude of facts that enrich our perspective on two conditions that, while sharing
traits of our own contemporary definitions for poverty and prosperity, might also
remain alien to us in terms of their etiology, nature, function, and significance.
Labels for the poor and wealthy, and the various definitions for these groups — to
follow two lines of inquiry — have provided us with a means of framing and con-
ceptualizing these terms.
The ruling elite and those persons descendant from a ruling class who enjoyed
“rank and influence” established Europe’s notion of “nobility,” a “hereditary
7 Similar problems existed in earlier times: see Quantifying the Roman Economy: Methods
and Problems, ed. A. Bowman and A. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
8 Logue, “In Pursuit of Prosperity,” 309. See also George C. Soulis, “The Gypsies in the
Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 15 (1961):
141–65 for remarks on the lack of historical record for Gypsies in Europe.
9 Skinner, “Gender and Poverty in the Medieval Community,” 204.
10 Duby, “The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages,” 162.
11 Referenced in Skinner, “Gender and Poverty in the Medieval Community,” 207.
12 Tittler, “Late Medieval Urban Prosperity,” 553.
x Introduction
aristocracy that monopolized the best land” and whose actions and behavior were
not to be questioned. 13 As Forst de Battaglia makes clear, every major European
country at the time of the Middle Ages had such an elite class that did not suffer
or admit encroachments from other classes until the Middle Ages were well under
way, or even until the advent of the Renaissance. 14 What the ruling nobility were
called in each country (in Spain and Portugal, for example, the ruling elite were
divided into the four groups of “ancient Grandees, the ennobled rich, the Cabal-
leros, and the Hidalgos”), 15 and what the ladder of monied and privileged persons
looked like below the top rung of the ruling elite, varied from country to country.
However, there were labels commonly used for such persons, labels ranging from
princes, barons, 16 counts, dukes, lords, knights, squires, patrons of arts and letters,
wealthy burghers, and the rich landed gentry to merchants, stewards, wardrobers,
treasurers, buyers, marshals, cooks, ministerial families, artisans, peasants, serfs,
villeins, and slaves, these latter groups variously defined by virtue of their experi-
ences of deprivation, extremely low standard of living, and hard labor, often invol-
untary, especially in the realm of land cultivation. 17 Molat offers the following:
Put most broadly, a pauper was a person who permanently or temporarily found
himself in a situation of weakness, dependence, or humiliation, characterized
by privation of the means to power and social esteem [. . . which included]
money, relations, influence, power, knowledge, skill, nobility of birth, physi-
cal strength, intellectual capacity, and personal freedom and dignity. Living
from hand to mouth, he had no chance of rising without assistance. 18
Judging by accounts that documented the recipients of alms, the poor were also
considered to be clerics, widows, orphans (a term used for someone of any age who
had lost his or her father, signifying the vulnerability of this group of people), preg-
nant women, and ‘fallen’ women. These various classes of women, in particular,
13 Otto Forst de Battaglia, “The Nobility in the European Middle Ages,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 5 (1962): 60–75, here 60–61. See J. J. Rosenthal, “Nobility,” ODMA
3: 1206.
14 Forst, “The Nobility,” 61.
15 Forst, “The Nobility,” 71.
16 See Margaret LaBarge, A Baronial Household in the Thirteenth Century (Totowa, NJ:
Barnes & Noble, 1980), 9 for her distinction between barons and knights; the former were sepa-
rated from the latter due to their “extreme wealth.”
17 LaBarge, A Baronial Household, 71. See also Leyser, “Women at Work,” 143; LaBarge, A
Baronial Household, 14; Skinner, “Gender and Poverty,” 205; A. H. de Oliveira Marques, Daily
Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages, trans. S. S. Wyatt (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1971), 9; J. A. Raftis, “The Structure of Commutation in a Fourteenth-Century Village, ”
in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 282–300, here 298.
18 Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, 5.
