Hospitals, money and other riches. Writing and practising economy in late medieval Italian charitable institutions

Abstract

The section contains contributions focusing on the practices and records relating to the economics of hospitals in late medieval Italy. Experts from different disciplines – economic historians, historians of the document, historians of the Middle Ages and of welfare institutions – offer a significant overview of hospitals situated in the north, the center and the south of the Italian peninsula between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. They investigate the mechanisms of funding of charities, the social and public implications of hospital care, the techniques and the accounting systems of revenue and expenditure, and finally, the religious merits connected not only to the care of the poor and sick, but also to the scriptures that recorded this activity.