Showing the Poor a Good Time: Caring for Body and Spirit in Bologna's Civic Charities

As poor relief in Christian Europe was being reformed through the sixteenth century, tensions emerged between a traditional charitable culture that allowed for occasional festivity, and the newer charitable culture that emphasized discipline, restraint, and efficiency. An undated document relating to a dispute that broke out in the main civic welfare agency of Bologna (Opera Pia dei Poveri Mendicanti) shows that gender and class were key dimensions of these two cultures, and underscores that the two should not be seen as sequential but as co-existing and competing. This study examines the dispute and proposes a dating for the document in the 1590s.