Charity and children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

The Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Hospital of the Innocents, founded in 1419 by a bequest of Francesco Datini, was the direct beneficiary of a shift in the ethos of charitable giving in the later Middle Ages. The Black Death, because it affected both children and the poor most harshly, provided new opportunities for charitable giving to be redirected from religious orders to lay institutions specializing in social problems. The high mortality of children, in combination with their role in preserving family solidarity, and by extension, the city as a whole, focused attention on the social problems that threatened childhood. Through charity towards children, philanthropy elevated the testator's concern with salvation from the personal to the collective, concern dramatized through civic ritual and millenial enthusiasm. Personal correspondence and wills bequeathing estates to the Innocenti define the central features of lay spirituality in the early Italian Renaissance. They clarify the connections between charitable foundations and children, both of which were cornerstones of personal immortality. The Silk Guild and the Commune of Florence exercised considerable watchfulness over the hospital's finances to ensure that neither the hopes of testators nor the safety of patrimony was compromised. Yet the Commune's need for liquidity threatened the Innocenti's tax-exempt status as well as the welfare of its patients. The hospital itself re-created the structure and values of the mercantile Florentine family, arranging for the adoption and apprenticeship of children of both sexes, and enrolling its girls in the Communal dowry fund. The depositions of abandoning parents, in turn, reflected compassion and concern for the infants they abandoned. The archival sources of the Hospital of the Innocents, the correspondence of merchants, and the treatises of humanists reveal that such compassion was predicated on the efficacy of children's prayers in the earthly fortunes of the city and the divine economy of salvation.