ABSTRACT
Before the rise of confessionalism, nationalism, and countless other modern complexities, the paramount community for most Europeans appears to have been their home town.1 Whether a rural village or a city-state of several thousand inhabitants, it was the local-defined by dialect, customs, dress, and so on-that primarily defined both insiders and outsiders, to the extent that people from only ten miles away might be considered “foreigners” and others of different economic or social status were called “compatriots.”2 One of the hallmarks of this enduring localism was the pre-modern urban community’s treatment of begging and abandoned children, a clear example of the supposedly rigid boundary between local insiders and all other outsiders. Most historical scholarship on child welfare has portrayed cities and other local communities of this era as generally indifferent and often quite hostile to foreign children, particularly to foundlings, outcasts who were assumed to bear the double ignominy of illegitimacy and foreignness. The great majority of these infants were quickly dispatched to large homes or poor wet nurses in the countryside (where the great majority soon died), while older urchins on the street were simultaneously expelled with adult beggars whenever possible.3 The orphans and other poor children of
citizens, by contrast, received generous public stipends, free education at poor schools, subsidized craft training and placement, and a host of other benefits from public as well as private sources.
