The Moral Economy of Epidemics: Emergency, Charitable Institutions and Poor Relief in Early Modern Italian Plague Regulations

Abstract

While scholars of medieval and early modern epidemics have mostly focused on the repressive measures deployed by authorities in order to hold marginal sectors of society in check, these were not the only way in which the powerful interacted with the lower sorts. In fact, something like a welfare system of extraordinary relief provisions was often implemented, going from simple almsgivings to the granting of special rights to the poor. The logic behind it was inspired by what I propose to style “the moral economy of epidemics”, i.e., a set of mainly religious but also legal, economic and medical values, somehow shared between the rulers and the ruled, and which, to some extent at least, compelled the former to help the latter in time of epidemic distress. Using the experiences of early modern Italian cities as a case study, I start with a methodological discussion of E. P. Thompson’s notion and its range of applicability; I then list some of the most relevant forms of aid authorities granted to the hardest-hit sections of the population; finally, I proceed to disentangle the different and sometimes conflicting values that explicitly or implicitly underlay these policies, while also allowing their recipients some room for agency.

An earlier version of this article has already appeared in Italian in Politics. Rivista di studi politici 15 (1) (2021): 75–91.