HEALTH CARE AND POOR RELIEF IN COUNTER- REFORMATION EUROPE Edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham with Jon Arrizabalaga London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham with Jon Arrizabalaga All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Health care and relief in Counter-Reformation Europe/[edited by] Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, with Jon Arrizabalaga p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-17844-4 (Print Edition) 1. Poor—Medical care—Europe, Southern—Religious aspects— Catholic Church—History. 2. Public welfare—Europe, Southern— Religious aspect—Catholic Church—History. 3. Counter-Reformation— Europe, Southern—History. I. Grell, Ole Peter. II. Cunningham, Andrew, Dr III. Arrizabalaga, Jon. RA418.5.P6H3874 1999 362. 1′094′09032–dc21 ISBN 0-203-98002-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-17844-4 (Print Edition) 5 ‘AD UNA SANCTA PERFETTIONE’: HEALTH CARE AND POOR RELIEF IN THE REPUBLIC OF VENICE IN THE ERA OF THE COUNTER-REFORMATION Richard Palmer ‘Finding a means to relieve beggars and the shamefaced poor in this city in their calamities, is not only laudable, pious and pleasing to our Lord God, but also honourable and healthy for our State because of the diseases which on many occasions have resulted.’ In this typical preamble to legislation in 1545, the Great Council of Venice endorsed motivations for poor relief which were both secular and religious, Notaries were to remind testators of the needs of the poor, and to report bequests to the Provveditori alla Sanità, the magistrates responsible for public health.1 Famine and epidemic disease inspired the Venetian poor law of 1529, and the fear that plague might be imported into the city by wandering beggars ensured that poor relief in Venice was the responsibility of the Health Office, under the Provveditori alla Sanità. Later the association of mendicity with crime, especially theft and extortion by deceit, added a further spur to government action, as did the spectre of the armed beggar, which brought vagrancy dangerously close to brigandage. The less dramatic requirements of social order—the need, for instance, to protect honest citizens from importunate beggars who loitered around churches and disrupted services—also helped to merge poor relief and social control, and contributed to the establishment of hospitals for the confinement of beggars, in Venice and elsewhere in the Republic, at the close of the sixteenth century. Christian charity provided a parallel motivation, not least because conspicuous State charity, along with the repression of heresy and vice, was a means of securing divine favour in a period when famine, plague and war were recurrent threats. Hospitals could for this reason be portrayed as ‘bastions of the Republic’.2 The Venetian patriciate also proved to be fertile ground for the piety and ideals of the Counter-Reformation, which became 86 RICHARD PALMER widely absorbed into the language of Venetian legislation. Before the end of the sixteenth century the Council of Ten was enforcing the regulation of prostitution on the grounds that the sins of the flesh not only brought disease to the body but infected the soul.3 At the same time the Provveditori alla Sanità and the Provveditori sopra Ospedali were moving towards the confinement of vagrants, because of the sins committed by beggars at night in public places, and the fate of the poverty-stricken who died on streets without the sacraments of the Church.4 Well before the Council of Trent a ‘new Catholicism’ or ‘new philanthropy’ had taken firm root. Much of the spirit of this Catholic Reformation may be seen in the work of the Companies of Divine Love, which were introduced into the Republic in the 1520s by Gaetano Thiene of Vicenza and Bartolomeo Stella of Brescia, both of whom had been members of the Company in Rome.5 These were societies of priests and laymen, bound together in a devotional life of prayer and frequent communion, whose aim was to express the love of Christ in service to the poor. Their prime concerns were the poveri vergognosi, the shamefaced poor, and the victims of the French Disease, whom they gathered together into new hospitals for incurables, the Incurabili. Closely linked to them, and active in hospitals in the Venetian Republic, were the new religious orders, the Theatines, founded in 1524 by Gaetano Thiene and Gian Pietro Carafa; the Barnabites, founded in 1530; and the Somaschi, founded in 1532 under the influence of a Venetian nobleman, Girolamo Miani. In 1537 Ignatius Loyola and his followers also made the hospitals of Venice a proving ground for ascetic self-sacrifice and self-mastery in nursing the sick poor, prior to the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1540. A further source of influence was the revival of the episcopate as a force for the moral and social reform of the diocese, prefigured in the De officio episcopi of the Venetian Gasparo Contarini, and actualised by Gian Matteo Giberti as Bishop of Verona from 1524 to 1543. Although Venice protected the lay status of hospitals, this did not prevent bishops from an involvement in the support and development of charities of all kinds, nor, after the Council of Trent, did it exempt hospitals from episcopal visitation. Giberti was active in numerous ways, in advancing Verona’s hospital for incurables, the Misericordia, and in founding a Compagnia della Carità, a voluntary society for the outdoor relief of the respectable poor. Giberti proved to be a model for later Counter-Reformation bishops such as Carlo Borromeo in his Archdiocese of Milan (which included several Venetian dioceses) and Agostino Valier in Verona.6 Valier, for example, was to introduce the Compagnie della Carità in Venetian Istria and Dalmatia during his Apostolic Visitation there in 1579.7 HEALTH CARE AND POOR RELIEF IN VENICE 87 To the ideal of serving Christ in the sick poor and providing comfort in adversity, the Counter-Reformation added an urgent concern for the redemption of sinners and the salvation of souls.8 Hospitals offered opportunities to minister to the spiritual needs of the poor, and frequently to attend at their deathbeds. The syphilitics of the Incurabili offered an obvious target for evangelical initiatives, and one which led on to other forms of moral welfare, in the care of repentant prostitutes and girls in moral danger. The protection and education of orphans, the need to keep them from lives of poverty, ignorance, idleness and crime also came to have a prominent place in the work of the Republic’s hospitals, which could increasingly be seen as weapons in the Counter-Reformation battle against ignorance and sin. Inmates of hospitals were brought within the discipline and authority of an ordered Catholic society, a prospect which appealed to Church and State alike. This process influenced the character of the Republic’s hospitals and the range of work which they undertook. Catholic reformers proved to be restlessly ambitious in piling up good works of different kinds one upon another, in their efforts to reach una sancta perfettione, a comprehensive system for the moral, spiritual and social needs of the poor. In this vision, medical care had a prominent place, but was by no means a priority amongst other forms of moral and social endeavour. Long before the Counter-Reformation, all the provincial capitals on the Venetian mainland boasted substantial hospitals, amongst which care for the sick poor and for foundlings were standard elements amongst other social concerns. In the north-east the largest towns, Treviso and Udine, possessed hospitals deriving from the flagellant movement of the thirteenth century, Santa Maria dei Battuti at Treviso, Santa Maria della Misericordia dei Battuti at Udine. Management was in the hands of religious confraternities of laymen. At Udine responsibility lay with a Greater Council which came in the sixteenth century to have 300 members—an assembly larger than the town council—though a smaller committee dealt with day-to-day management. On the other side of the Venetian mainland, in the west, the largest towns, Brescia and Bergamo, provide a different pattern. These shared in a widespread movement in the Archdiocese of Milan in the mid-fifteenth century which created centralised Ospedali Maggiori by the amalgamation of smaller institutions. The preaching of the Observant Franciscans was influential in their formation, though they also owed an explicit debt to the exemplary hospitals of Florence and Siena. Like the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan, these hospitals promoted the cross-wards of hospital architecture— four wards radiating from the intersection of a cross where an altar was 88 RICHARD PALMER placed. At Brescia the Ospedale Maggiore was again in the care of a lay confraternity with councils of 200 and 100, and a smaller executive committee. At Bergamo the situation was different, for the Ospedale Maggiore did not incorporate the town’s great confraternity, the Misericordia, which played a systematic role in safeguarding the poor of the whole province in times of dearth.