Experiences of Charity: Complex Motivations in the Charitable Endeavour, c. 1100–c. 1650 1

In this collection we explore the experience of charity, examining the complex motivations that prompt charitable activity, and ask questions about the shared experience of charity that characterised the relationship between paupers, administrators and donors in medieval and early modern Europe. Religion as a motivation has been examined extensively in the historiography of charitable aid, but it is not the only motivation, and in the following chapters we consider, alongside the religious, other impulses arising from civic, familial, personal and political considerations in the provision of various forms of poor relief. How do these motivations change or persist over the period 1100 to 1650 and in response to new religious ideas of the Protestant Reformation and post-Reformation Catholicism? The volume sets out to examine these issues in case studies relating to England, France and the Low Countries.