Poverty as Deviance

Distinguish relative and absolute poverty

Popular social categories: class, race and gender

Heterogeneous society: nobility; gentry; clergy; peasants

Social mobility: noblesse de robe; noblesse d’épée; ancien régime

‘Class’ anachronistic; contemporaries use language of ‘sorts’ or ‘estates’

Demesne; feudalism; manorialism; subsistence; yeoman; husbandman; serf; vagrant

Mendicant; St Francis of Assisi; Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians

‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat’ (2 Thessalonians 3.10)

Alms; almsgiving; structural -v- conjunctural poor; poveri vergognosi

Juan Luis Vives (d.1540); Elizabethan Poor Laws (1563-1601); Bridewell

Censuses: Venice 1527, Norwich 1570, Toledo 1598

Capuchins (est.1520)

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1961): ‘le grand enfermement’ [great
confinement]; ‘social construction’

Distinguish betterment and subsistence migration

Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (1974): ‘an
economy of makeshifts’

‘Rogue literature’: Liber Vagatorum (1510); Thomas Harman, Caveat for Common
Cursitors (1566)

John Gay, The Beggars Opera (1728): ‘the lower people have their vices in a degree
as well as the rich [but] are punished for them’

Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (1994):
‘... vagrants were no ordinary criminals; they were regarded as a major threat to
society and therefore pursued by all authorities and stigmatized as deviants. The
offence of which they were accused posed a serious challenge to the moral and
physical well-being of the Christian Commonwealth’
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