ABSTRACT
This volume offers a comparative survey of the welfare provisions available to the sick and poor in Catholic Southern Europe during the Counter-Reformation period, 1540-1700. It seeks to highlight the relationship between a revived and dynamic Catholicism and welfare reforms on one hand, and the changes in health care, that is ‘professional’ medical care, nursing and hospitals, on the other. It draws attention to the fact that the major context for health care in the early modern period was poor relief and that welfare provision has to be seen within the context of the predominant religious ideology, in this case the Counter-Reformation. Together the thirteen chapters in this volume provide ample examples of how and why a revitalised and strengthened post-Tridentine Catholicism managed to reshape and reinvigorate welfare provisions in Southern Europe, while simultaneously emphasising the extent to which this restructuring depended on, and based itself on, earlier reforms initiated as a consequence of the civic humanist and Catholic reform movements of the fifteenth century.
