This volume is a product of the recent scholarly interest in the architecture of early modern hospitals—charitable institutions dedicated to the poor that were the main component of welfare systems. Attention to the social history of the poor, public charitable systems, and their relation to state building emerged in the 1960s as part of a widespread interest in cultural history and flourished during the 1970s. Authors such as Brian Pullan (Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice, 1971), Michel Mollat (The Poor in the Middle Ages, 1978), and, a few years later, Bronislaw Geremek (Poverty: A History, 1989) produced landmark works in the history of poverty in early modern Europe.1
Calls to examine the architecture that housed such charitable systems, in addition to their sociopolitical and cultural aspects, arose in the same years. In an essay published in 1973 on the cruciform hospitals that...
University of California Press