Worlds of Spanish Poverty: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

This dissertation traces developments in the ideas, images, and institutions of poverty in early-modern Spain. Using a series of intellectual treatises, literary and artistic works, and research in institutional records from six different archives in Madrid and Sevilla, this dissertation presents two main arguments. The first is that looking through the lens of poverty provides us with a clearer vision of the creation and transformation of early-modern Spain, helping us better understand its intellectual traditions of humanist, scholastic, and Enlightenment thinking; its politico-religious conflicts of authority during the Counter-Reformation; its cultural production during its Golden Age; and its socioeconomic institutions of confraternities, hospitals, and “economic societies” throughout those periods. The second is that focusing on the Spanish world in particular provides us with a sharper image of poverty, and conceptions thereof, in early-modern Europe, for on this issue Spain stands out in its distinct combination of intellectual output, literary and artistic creation, and institutional development—a combination that influenced approaches beyond Europe and into the Atlantic and Pacific spheres as well. This dissertation engages with fundamental questions regarding church and state power, social and religious organization, and individual agency; elite discourse amid widespread inequality; poverty as a material versus spiritual condition; the role of moral desert in charity versus in penalty; the place of Christian (and/or civic) duty versus economic efficiency; and the function of labor as a tool of individual rehabilitation versus one of societal advancement. We see many of these same questions in our own society’s contemporary conversations about poverty and its alleviation, making this dissertation especially relevant to current debates and practices.