Chapter 12 - Alms Petitions and Compassion in Sixteenth-Century London

Summary

Rebecca Tomlin uses an archive of some three hundred alms petitions made c.1580–1600 at St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, London to show how early modern compassion was an emotion that was governed by judgement. The chapter explores the strategies adopted by petitioners to move almsgivers to generosity; how almsgivers decided who deserved their charity, how petitions seek to move money from donor to petitioner, and how early modern charity is connected to compassion. Tomlin discusses how early modern compassion was an emotion that was governed by the giver’s judgement about the merit of the petitioner and the truth of his or her story, and how the identities of both the petitioner and the potential donor are mutually formed in the performance of petitioning. The chapter shows that the expression of generosity through cash was encouraged not by emotive descriptions of physical or emotional suffering but by focus on the economic consequences of disasters. Collections seem to gesture towards some kind of restitution of the pre-existing social order, rather than evoking lament and emotional empathy, although a sense of social solidarity also seems to have been operative when collections were gathered for local causes.