Given the durability and the effectiveness of a care system for the poor run by private subjects - corporations, fraternal and clerical orders - the historiography on modern Naples has relegated to the background the centralizing tendencies within assistance to the poor which occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century. Starting from the observation that such tendencies were not absent, but that they did not produce a substantial alteration of the traditional order, the paper investigates the reasons for the weakness of the central power, reconstructing the events of the foundation of the first great poor hospital by the Spanish viceroy in 1667. The S.Gennaro extra moenia Hospital was inspired indeed by the aims of a centralization and a secularization of care, and by a repressive approach to marginality and deviance. But its foundation and especially the attempt by the central government to ensure it tax revenues, produced a fierce conflict between city dwellers and central power, between an old and a new conception of the assistance to the poor. This conflict weakened the centralizing project to the extent that it threatened the social compromise upon which the Spanish power in the South of Italy was based indeed.
Per ”particular volontaria oblatione”…Il real Hospitio di S.Gennaro de’ poveri e la centralizzazione dell’assistenza nella Napoli di Antico Regime
Clemente, Alida
2013-01-01
Abstract
Given the durability and the effectiveness of a care system for the poor run by private subjects - corporations, fraternal and clerical orders - the historiography on modern Naples has relegated to the background the centralizing tendencies within assistance to the poor which occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century. Starting from the observation that such tendencies were not absent, but that they did not produce a substantial alteration of the traditional order, the paper investigates the reasons for the weakness of the central power, reconstructing the events of the foundation of the first great poor hospital by the Spanish viceroy in 1667. The S.Gennaro extra moenia Hospital was inspired indeed by the aims of a centralization and a secularization of care, and by a repressive approach to marginality and deviance. But its foundation and especially the attempt by the central government to ensure it tax revenues, produced a fierce conflict between city dwellers and central power, between an old and a new conception of the assistance to the poor. This conflict weakened the centralizing project to the extent that it threatened the social compromise upon which the Spanish power in the South of Italy was based indeed.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
