RICERCA ITALIANA     

Institutions, assistance and religiouness in Southern Italy between XVIII and XIX century

Università degli Studi di Bari

Abstract

The search program means to outline the history of the institutions, the assistance and the religiousness in the society of Southern Italy between XVIII and XIX century. The history of the shapes and of the sanitary, charitable and educational institutions of the past is also the history of the infancy, of the family, of women and of the pauperism. The protagonists are, therefore, the deserted children, the orphans, the lonely and needy women, lacking in the protection of a family, the dishonoured women, the wanderers, the beggars, the poor, the sick, the boys corrupted and unruly: that crowd of despaired that the necessity or the vice relegated to the margins of the civil society, deprives of aids and of every real hope of ransom. A very faceted and varied universe, made of individual stories and tragically common ways, to which was destined, in the course of the centuries, the work of public and private assistance (sometimes of lay matrix other times of religious inspiration), through the foundation of foundling hospitals, of homes, and male and feminine hospitals, orphanages, workhouses, colleges, convent schools, etc.
Italy, but more precisely Southern Italy, preserves a large archivist documentation, still partly unexplored, that allows a deepened acquaintance of the events, of the protagonists, of the charitable politics, of the charitable organizations in the plot of the relationships between institutions and society.
The thematic-chronological route of the search program focuses in the XVIII-XIX centuries the passage from the system of the charity to that one of the beneficence, that represented the most intense and exclusive moment of the individual and religious charity act to relief of the un-wealthy people. As from the second half of XIX century there was a rapid, and for those times revolutionary, change that would have carried to the further progressive evolution towards the social welfare
An intermediate and necessary step that it has represented the springboard for the great leap towards the obligatory social welfare, from which the warning signs of that social welfare system were caught, and where the services is not more a charitable action, discretionary and paternalistic, but it is the content of a real subjective right one of the citizen. The suggestions of the search are of varied nature. They are not only those traditional of legal-institutional character, that certainly will be reconstructed in the within of the search program, but they are pushed quite beyond, from the story of the assistance and the charity, to that of the health, from the story of the world of the poor, of the phenomenology of the pauperism to that one of the mentality and the sensibility.
The richness of archives and the use of classic and new sources allows a scientific search that is able of measuring with caution the evaluations of quantitative character and the qualitative inquiry, by reading in the documents all the suggestions of the topic object of this analysis.
The panorama of the sources and of the archives of ecclesiastical and lay institutions that have managed in the course of the centuries the material and moral assistance to the fringes of the population in difficulty between pity and the social control, are indispensable to estimate the demographic and social aspects of that variegated world of the poor and of the needy who lived to the margins of the society.
However the same documents represent, in the meanwhile, a sort of "eye" of the institutions on the southern society between XVIII and XIX century that recorded, in the long and centuries-old duration, the passage from the charity to the beneficence, from the institutionalised and secularised assistance and that it sees, in the Napoleonic cut, the fundamental point of this passage. <<<

Principal Investigator

Giovanna Da Molin Università degli Studi di BARI

Research Objectives

In the modern European society, most of the urban and rural population lived in a more or less deep material and moral poverty.
The main research purpose is to investigate on the phenomenology of the pauperism and the social alienation as well as to determine the role played, in a wide and articulated consent network, by the ecclesiastical and lay institutions - which managed the material and spiritual assistance to the poor, the ill, the widows, the deserted children, the orphans, the vagabonds, the pilgrims, the social and ethnical groups who lived inside and at the fringe of the past societies - with a particular reference to the Southern Italy between the XVIII and XIX century.
The historical reference period is particularly significant as regards the reconstruction of the steps and methods of the laicization and secularization process of the charitable institutions (religious institutions, charitable organisations, confraternities, hospices, hospitals, cereal agencies, pawnshops, wedding agencies, etc.) through the Napoleonic caesura, which inherits, starting from the XVIII century, a slow research process to determine the social and economic causes of the pauperism and of the social alienation.
Considering the poverty in the Southern Italy the merely economic point of view is not sufficient to characterise this phenomenon in its complexity. There is, indeed, a structural poverty connected to the territory events, to its vocation and its demography, to the migratory inbound and outbound flows. The research program will draw the history of the assistance for the poor, the alienated people through the examination of the sources kept in the civil and ecclesiastic archives, concerning the historiographical debate on the phenomenon.
Particular attention will be given to the child abandonment practice, a practice, which, as Gutton wrote, at least in some periods, was an almost natural event in the poor world. The children of the dishonour, of the shame, off-springs of the pre-marriage relationships were granted to the town public assistance together with the children of the misery, of the hunger, born in extremely poor families.
The research intends to study the subject of the orphans, of the deserted children outlining the social and demographic features of this phenomenon, as well as, on the basis of new methodological approaches and new sources of archive, unexplored so far, to investigate and understand the causes of the abandonment, the abandoned child bearer’s features with a wide reference to the relative administrative and legislative scenario and to the lively debate, which characterised the XVIII and XIX century, about the theme of the orphans, their assistance and education.
The big town hospices, the foundling hospitals, the orphanages, the male and female boarding schools, the poor shelters, the convent boarding schools, the working houses represent the wide scenario of institutions that between the ‘700 and the ’800 were devoted to the charitable policies towards children and kids without family and, in general, towards the fringe of the population in difficulty.
The social history of the poor assistance found the last decades a more precise collocation in the history of institutions - political, social, religious, economical ones. In the complex history of the Southern Italy, the charitable organisations and, more precisely, the meanings that the charitable institute presents, with respect to the social life, must be analysed in the plot of the relationships between the institutions and society, as well as in the dialectics: religious power – powers of the lay society, taking into the right consideration the patrimonial and jurisdictional interests and contrasts between the two powers.
The research, in particular, will focus on the reconstruction of the historical processes of the class corporative charitable institutes (the noble and professional ones), this will make possible the reconstruction of the applied charitable strategies and forms in contexts of strong social differentiations by means of some tools for the collection and the management of tangible indications of the believers’ mercy.
In this context the investigation extends as far as the analysis of the relation between the social life and the religiousness in the southern population – with specific analysis of the Sicilian and Calabrese territories – between the first modern age and the Restoration, trying to cast light upon the complicated and very crammed plot of the social and political life of the old regime, upon the role played by the brotherhoods, upon the exchange, contest, mobilization circuits. In short, the research objective is to develop the knowledge focusing the attention on the fringe of the population “in difficulty”, that have been little investigated so far (the poor, vagabonds, orphans, deserted children, lonely women, widows, deserted women, prostitutes, rascals and misled young people) exploring through a deep archivist research - classical and new sources in public archives and mainly in the private ones belonging to single ecclesiastical or civil institutions. Extending the analysis on some unexplored territories (the pre-unitary Apulian provinces, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily) in a national and international scenario, the research will determine the charitable institution role in the Southern society in a significant historical period such as the Napoleonic caesura one.
At the end this research, thanks to the collected information, will draw a significant picture of assistance forms for the childhood and the social alienation, defining differential models of the male and female assistance in order to reconstruct a more and more clear image of the past society. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The contemporary historiography, in particular the French one, has offered, starting from the 70’s of the last century, details and fascinating suggestions about poverty, social alienation and assistance in the past societies. Michel Mollat’s monumental researches about the poor and the poverty in the Middle Ages and the Jean-Pierre Gutton’s study on the society and the poor in the modern ages are good examples together with the remarkable scientific contributions by Bronislaw Geremek and Brian Pullan.
As regards the Southern Italy Gabriele De Rosa’s remarks seem to be of great interest; he, in defining the poor features, makes reference not only to the economical and social factors, but also to the mental structures.
In this wide context of reference to the neediest fringe of the southern population in the modern times, in the scientific production of the second half of the ‘900, the childhood represented an ignored and forgotten subject for long time until, at the beginning of the 60’s of the last century, the French historian Philippe Ariès, with the book L’enfant et la vie familiale sans l’ancien regime, started the study of the childhood history. Among these studies Lloyd de Mause’s analyses seem to be particularly interesting. He revealed the different forms of violence on children, playing on the psycho-history and on the negative death instincts. Other important contributions are those of Stone.
In Italy also the researches on childhood find many experts of different sectors: human and health geography, family and education with significant plots between the custom studies and the demographical analyses.
The childhood history is not only a story of love, care and protection, but also a story made of negligence and abandonment, of exploitation and violence. In the last decades the bibliography related to the child abandonment enriched remarkably. It is signed by historians, demographists, sociologists, anthropologists, pedagogists and psychologists coming not only from Italy, France and Iberian Peninsula, which were traditionally considered as the cradle of the expression, but also from North Europe and even America.
Speaking about the institutions traditionally devoted to the deserted child assistance, the first information comes from Italy and is recorded in the minutes, which confirm the hosted children and their support charges. The hospice establishments devoted to the deserted children will favour the birth and the increase of remarkable archives, that, thanks to the history of the abandonment, it results today the oldest social history, which can be written.
In literature, valuable synthesis works are available, they reconstruct the evolution of the deserted childhood phenomenon in the modern Europe and define a centuries-old trends in two phases. The irregular birth number, meant globally (illegitimate and foundling), decreased and was stagnant during the ‘600 till the second half of the XVIIII century, then it increased up to reach record levels at the end of ‘700 and above all at the first half of ‘800.
The features of the secular trends of the abandonment numbers do not change from area to area as regards the modern Italy, notwithstanding the different application of the Tridentine reform, the different repercussion of the mortality crises, the different charitable policies and, in this view, the hospice organisation for the deserted children.
In modern Italy the feature of the numbers of desertions don’t change from zone to zone, although the different application of the reform of the Council of Trent, the wide repercussions of mortality crisis, the different welfare politics and the organization of the foundling hospitals.
On the whole, the irregular birth values concerning some countries mark a declined development till 1750 and an increased development as from this date; the middle of XVIII century marks a “cut” and outlines an opposite trend. In this century, in Italy, the desertion of children is a heavy phenomenon with a trend which not different from the French one and other European countries.
Besides the different economic and social reasons (demographic pressure, financial difficulties, increasing of the wedding age, increasing of the celibacy), the reasons that probably could have determined the moving of this phenomenon, from the beginning to the end of the modern age, are numerous and shifty because are the result of not written or documented factors.
The changes in the collective mentality were very important in the course of the centuries, the transformations of the customs and the modifications in the familiar structures operated under the stimulus of immediate solicitudes - which was for example the civil institution of the “ruota” in french age – or under the stimulus of hidden and slow pressure - that of the Church concerning the sacraments and the value of the life conduct through the capillary net of the parishes. As David Kertzer suggests, with regard to the outbreak of the desertions in catholic Europe, a complex reading of the phenomenon, beside the economic, demographic and cultural interpretations, throw light on a complicated scene inside of which the honour of the women, the protection of the families, the role of the Church and that of the State are interlaced.
The custom of the desertion, not only found in the orphanage its institutional centre, but also knew other ways of escape: just in modern England, as Serge Chassagne testifies, the system of the baby farming allowed in fact to thousands of families of getting rid of their sons with the payment of a flat sum of money.
However, dealing with the large number of practices, forms and institutions of charity dedicated to the protection of deserted children and adolescents in modern age lead unavoidably the student of this subject to a cross-roads in which the numerous debates of the last thirties years on the history of infancy, of the family, of women, of the pauperism and of the charitable-welfare politics of many Italian States of ancien régime - with particular attention to Southern Italy - of the pedagogy, of the sociology and the historical demography intersect.
The monographic numbers of specialized historical and historical-demographic reviews also have been dedicate, in the last years, to arguments about child labour, slavery, relationships between siblings, family and kinship closely integrated but not exclusively addressed to theme of deserted infancy. These assumptions open another historiographical mainstream about girls and boys survived to the desertion and to the first years of their life who came inmates when the period of the wet-nursing in the charitable institutes (orphanages, children’s homes, farmhouses, etc.) finished. Often, and especially starting from the first years of XIX century, the eldest foundlings shared with numerous orphans, corrupted and rascals, lonely women, wanderers, beggars and old sick, the disadvantage of an illegitimate birth and of a desertion.
Honour and virtue are the two main points, of seven-nineteenth-century Italy, on which the welfare paradigm destined to physically or morally deserted girls - foundlings, orphans, young girls dependent on poor families that aren’t insufficient for to their education – is developed.
On the wake of convents born after the Counter-Reformation, with the Age of Enlightenment also the welfare institutions, which were dedicated to offer a generic relief to the most fragile girls, begin to change their targets, prerogatives and purposes, gradually transforming themselves in real educational machines propaedeutic to a life organized in a familiar, professional and religious way.
As numerous monographic works on this theme testify, from the second half of the 1700's, although the girls hospices maintained their main target, that is the protection of the deserted youth, they begin to assume peculiar characteristics following strategies of participation applied to new models of assistance (much wider than the previous centuries) and addressing to a kind of men to protect. An inner division then separates the institutions delegated to accommodate girls, of which the honour must be preserved, from those institutions redefined with the name of retreats or shelters destined to older women, widows, unhappily married, penitent, redeemed, sinners and former-delinquents.
Going on the exam of the male welfare, the main purpose was that to prepare the boys for an eventual introduction in the working world and to prevent the laziness, the wandering and the indiscipline. The two models of male welfare politics - the first with a professional character and of vocational training and the second correctional and instructive - strongly feel the effect of the new welfare theories no more oriented to defend the fringes of population structurally more weak which, until then, have constituted the greater charity burden. On the contrary they were oriented to preserve the society from the threats of the redefined categories of the recluse, identify as social dangers: healthy young boys but lazy, wanderers, players, beggars, bad examples for a world in a positive development. Inside of this faceted and varied universe, made of single stories to which in the course of the centuries, the work of the public and private attendance – sometimes of lay roots, sometimes of religious inspiration - has been destined, a particular field of surveying is turned to the history of the hospitals, the sanitary institutions and the role of the reference society. <<<