ABSTRACT
The Congregation of San Giovanni Battista, founded in 1701, was the Florentine variant of a late seventeenth-century Jesuit model of charity, exported from France to Piedmont and the Papal states, as well as Tuscany. The name, relationship to the head of household, age, state of health, skill, employer and weekly wage is listed for each individual, followed by the form of charity requested. In what respect the applicants to the Congregation differed in their household structure from that of the overall urban population of Florence will only emerge when Professor Santini has completed his analysis of the census of 1810. The fact that a substantially greater number of the poor were ‘conjunctural’ rather than ‘structural’ has directed historical attention towards the causes rather than the condition of poverty. The study of the history of the poor is conditioned by the nature of the evidence, generated by the institutional mechanisms elaborated by society for charitable or repressive purposes.
