Cities, Constitutions, and Sovereign Borrowing in Europe, 1274–1785
In the decades after 1506, and building largely on pre-existing institutions, Bologna developed what was arguably the most extensive network of social service institutions in Italy. Some of its benefits were similar to what we find emerging elsewhere in 15th and 16th century Europe, and have been described in studies by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Gianna Pomata, Lucia Ferrante, Luisa Ciammitti, Massimo Fornasari, Gabriela Zarri, myself and others: extensive organized food distribution to poor on the basis of a preliminary census of need; a large foundling home; 7 orphanages for girls and boys that work actively to educate, train, and return orphaned and abandoned children to society as workers and parents; shelters for battered women and for prostitutes seeking to leave the profession; 2 major hospitals; a shelter for the mentally ill, a syphilitics hospital; a large centralized shelter and workhouse for the poor; a large public pawn bank, the Monte della Pietà , giving low cost loans to the poor; and a system of city doctors who are paid only upon completion of a course of treatment, and then only if there is a cure.
These institutions are not all unique, though I would argue that the level of benefits seems higher here than elsewhere in Italy. Beyond these institutions, there are other elements as well, particularly services for the working poor who constituted such a large part of the urban community. A key area of need for this group was dowries, and here we see that Bologna developed an innovative dowry fund from 1583 that was unlike any other in Italy. It was open only to small investors and gradually developed into something like a credit union or savings bank; deposits doubled in about 10 years. Here again, Mauro Carboni’s work provides relevant statistics and analysis.
Whereas Florence's Monte delle Dote was a public enterprise, run by its oligarchy and offering an attractive investment to wealthy families, Bologna's Monte was privately operated by the investors themselves, and attracted mostly small deposits. Families of modest and moderate means accounted for about 1/3rd of all deposits. The remaining 2/3rds were employers, private benefactors, and institutions that offered dowries to servants, or to needy girls out of charity.
Bologna’s Monte actively discouraged investments by wealthy families by imposing a relatively low ceiling on deposits. Only Bolognese residents could own Monte credits. The minimum amount to open an account was set at 25 lire, a sum equal to about two-month’s salary of a menial worker, and the maximum deposit was 500 lire, raised to 800 lire in 1627. From 1583 and 1620, 847 accounts were opened on behalf of young girls belonging to 649 families. We know the father’s profession for 182 of those families. None represented leading aristocratic families, 21 were urban professionals (notaries, doctors); 157 represented modest mechanical trades (hemp weavers, silk weavers, carpenters, tailors, porters, bricklayers and so on); 4 were sharecroppers.
Beyond the scope and level of benefits, what was significant about Bologna’s system of civic charity was how it balanced broad administration with close ties to the civic government to create an interconnected network that focused deliberately on the urban population. All of the charitable institutions were run by large confraternities or companies who cycled scores of volunteers through administrative positions for limited terms. Moreover, some of the key charitable institutions deliberately aimed to recruit their boards across representative categories, ensuring that these include nobles, gentlemen, merchants, and superior artisans. The senatorial oligarchy promoted this. It kept its finger on charitable institutions in a period of reforms of the 1550s, when most of the key institutions wrote or rewrote their statutes along a roughly uniform model that other charitable institutions subsequently adopted in the decades that follow. A key feature in the new statutes is that these charitable confraternities all chose their governing Rector from the Senate. There emerged a core of Senators who rotated from one institution to another, giving it an informal co-ordination. This was precisely the period when the Senate was establishing its assunterie to expand its administrative capacities, and when it was bleeding power from the Anziani. At the same time, the Monte della Pietà became the financial administrator of a number of the key charitable institutions.
These two factors – Senatorial rectors and centralized financial administration – took the plethora of individual charitable institutions and consolidated them into a working civic network of charity: Bologna deliberately chose not to follow other cities like Florence that entrusted these social charities to smaller and often hand-picked administrative boards serving life terms. Power was shared and decentralized though a broader mass of the citizens who rotated through appointments, increasing the level of civil engagement. A further key characteristic is that benefits were largely for citizens only – not for transients or visitors. This was commonly found in statutes elsewhere, but seems to have been policed more rigorously here.
Moving from charity to employment, we find that Bologna’s guilds retained more authority in regulating professional behaviour and directing the local economy. An earlier economic historiography saw guilds as brakes on early modern economy, but this is being revised by the current generation of Italian economic historians. Alberto Guenzi finds that guilds certainly defend their interests, but also often push innovation in methods and production techniques. Raffaella Sarti has shown that the guild model was so strong locally that it moved beyond productive industries into the service sector: in the 17th century, servants formed a guild to defend their interests, and managed to keep it operative into the 18th century. This suggests that the model of collective organization and a regulated economy was still compelling locally.
Peter Scott: Ethics “in” and “for” Higher Education
The university first developed as a distinctive institution in Southern and Western Europe in the high Middle Ages. The qualifier ‘distinctive’ is important in two senses. First, there had been ‘academic’ institutions in Europe before the emergence of the university (or stadium general) - in 7th century North Umbria (Bead) or at the court of Charlemagne (Albumin). But they had been monastic or court schools, organizational elements within much larger configurations. Second, ‘academic’ institutions also flourished in the Byzantine east, where institutions close to universities did emerge, and in the Islamic world, where the unity of religion and state made it more difficult for distinctive institutions to emerge. So, although the structural differentiation of the medieval university was decisive in terms of future evolution, its significance can be exaggerated in intellectual and normative terms. The university did provide a separate organizational basis for the emergence of a distinctive value system, scholasticism. But the degree to which scholasticism could really be distinguished from the wider culture of medieval Catholicism and feudal society was limited.
Only with the coming of the Renaissance - and especially the Reformation - did the organizational (semi) independence of the universities become significant. Once the unity of medieval Europe had been shattered, universities played a crucial role in state-building. They educated new (and more secular) bureaucratic elites, bridged or brokered between mercantile and court cultures, and promoted new intellectual values by providing ideological justifications for the new politico-religious order and proto-scientific culture. Many universities, of course, were founded between 1500 and 1700. One indicator of the importance of universities during this period is their social penetration. In England the so-called ‘Long Parliament’, which was first elected in 1641 and went on to wage war against King Charles I, contained more graduates than any English (by then United Kingdom) Parliament before 1945.
Yet in some respects this second flourishing of the European university was a false dawn. From the mid 17th to the late 18th centuries universities stagnated both in terms of student numbers and of intellectual engagement (- this statement remains broadly valid despite recent studies that suggest universities were not as stagnant during this period as was once supposed) (Porter 1996). In fact the new Academies of Science, ‘practical’ engineers, Enlightenment illuminati, the first stirrings of the dominant media and publishing industries, radical thought and revolutionary politics - these were the channels through which intellectual and scientific innovation flowed for more than a century. While the university played some part in the scientific revolution, its role in the Enlightenment was tangential, even accidental and value systems evolved independently. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 1800 the university had become a threatened species, at risk of being superseded by other more ‘modern’ academic institutions (de Ridder-Symeons 1996).
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