ABSTRACT
Emden was a sixteenth-century boom town. Its population exploded from perhaps 3000 at the start of the century to as much as 25000 by the early 1570s. Emden's case immediately draws attention to itself by the variety of its institutions for poor relief. The first half of the sixteenth century witnessed rather slow changes and few innovations in Emden's system of social welfare provision, despite the dramatic religious transformation brought about the introduction of Protestantism. Perhaps the most unusual discovery about Emden's early post-Reformation social welfare is the survival of the religious confraternities. Emden's deacons of the haussitzenden poor were clearly ecclesiastical officers who reported problems first to the consistory. The creation of the Reformed church office of 'deacon' to handle most of Emden's poor relief demonstrates that city's new ecclesiology provided a new shape to the earlier 'administrators of the poor'.
