8 - Pietist Universal Reform and Care of the Sick and the Poor

Summary

The first three decades of the eighteenth century saw the rise to prominence of the Francke Foundations in Halle as the major charitable voluntary institution of the North German Pietist reform movement. The Stiftungen bore the name of their founder, August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). After Francke's death his son Gotthilf August and his associates continued the founder's work, although after 1740, they were slowly constrained by the growing secularization of the Prussian state and its academic institutions to abandon the goal of universal Christian reform and to concentrate instead on Francke s narrower institutional legacy. This legacy consisted in a large array of charitable facilities, most famously the orphanage for abandoned and impoverished children founded in 1696, but also a house for widows, an array of schools dedicated to a Christian and pragmatic education of a wide spectrum of society, and a hospital and dispensary. The rise of this institution of multiple objectives in the pursuit of religious and charitable reform coincided with the founding and equally swift rise of the Friedrich University of Halle, which during the first part of the eighteenth century assumed a prominent role among central European universities in the administrative sciences and medicine.