Medieval hospitals in Italy, originally intended to house pilgrims and comfort the dying, evolved from religious institutions reflecting communal and personal piety to civic facilities intended to provide a comprehensive social welfare and medical service to the urban community. The founding and management of hospitals provided a means for the acquisition of political power and social status for the new urban elites. Brasher’s study provides the first comprehensive examination of the foundation of small independent hospitals throughout the region beginning in the twelfth century and then considers the challenges to establishing and managing these institutions in the face of ecclesiastical and political interference over the succeeding three centuries. The resulting charitable institutions reflected a nexus of lay initiative, religious culture, and civic political life. The independent nature of the individual hospitals has made generalization difficult, yet through a comprehensive examination of evidence from over 175 hospitals, the volume covers a wide geographic and chronological expanse to create a picture of the internal life of the institutions and their place within the urban community. The rise of the central, civic hospital of the fifteenth century, generally seen as a particular phenomenon of the Renaissance, is placed in the context of its earlier origins. The book will be of interest to students and researchers of medieval social, religious, or urban history.
Chapter six traces the reform efforts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which eventually led to the consolidation of small independent hospitals into large civic institutions that became increasingly medicalized. Health boards created after the Black Death led to secularization of health care and poor relief. These social service institutions evolved over the early decades of the century and were a gradual response to the evolving needs and challenges of the population and the end of the communal era. This unification and institutionalization of civic oriented hospital care, resulted in one large Ospedale Maggiore, which was duplicated in towns and cities throughout Italy in the mid fifteenth century. It signified the end of the small, independent hospital movement that had so transformed the landscape of urban society earlier in the Middle Ages. The process of centralization that swept hospitals up in its wake was a universal feature of Italian state-formation in the age of the Renaissance
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.