ABSTRACT
Although often viewed as a marker for social and economic history, charity forms part of the wider history of giving and receiving, and abuts on broad sociopolitical questions. Historians of charity have to fight their way through a veritable swamp of conceptual and methodological problems. It is essential, first of all, to historicize a social practice which is often viewed as an ahistoric psychological propensity: just as the poor are always with us, so, it is held, will the wish to alleviate want through charitable activity be constant over time. Social and economic historians have endeavored to measure the charitable performance of different societies by studying the long-term development of certain charitable acts, such as testamentary donations. W.K. Jordan’s (1959) pioneering analysis of English philanthropy based on this approach has been criticized, however, for failing to take into account inflationary trends, and also for assuming that formal charitable acts offer a reliable guide to the total charitable performance of a given society. Certainly it would seem unquestionable that formal charitable acts have always been outweighed by private and informal acts of giving in face-to-face situations (this includes charity within lower-class groups, an important topic for the urban working class). The social history of charity thus involves sensitivity to limits of evidence, beyond formal acts, as well as insistence that charity can vary greatly according to social and cultural context.
