224. Early Modern Poverty Part 3

We are summarizing the problem circa 1525, before we get into the pan-European, well, Western European, solutions to the problem, driven by the Humanists.

We have a simultaneous admiration and horror towards poverty.  The warmth stems from the role of poverty in elite society.  They are objects of charity, and without charity how do we get into heaven?  Plus, we sense the people who renounce their power and wealth and choose to live like poor hermits are spiritually superior, they are blessed; they are holy.  So in those senses poverty is good actually.  And this confounds everything, because of course mainly poverty is horribly bad, in obvious ways.  

It’s horrible in the countryside, where there is still a lot of elite oppression, and food storage is not deep or high quality.  There are terribly insufficient wild resources for the numbers of people that live in more densely populated country.  You might say there is always enough fish in Norway, but the Tuscan countryside is overpopulated for wild resources to help for long.  

 It’s horrible in the cities where the poor go when they starve, hoping there is food there.  The granaries and warehouses help.  Places like London and Antwerp, Lisbon and Amsterdam are getting grain from surplus areas like the Baltic.  1525, we don’t really have much in Ukraine yet, the steppe nomads are still out there.  There is little in the way of ghost acreage in North America. Europe is on its own really.

And the poor, how to think of them, they are increasing in number, dramatically.  And changing attitudes towards the poor are a big part of the cultural change and ideological shift towards secularization that is part of our subject.