This article surveys the literature on charity in the Dutch Republic, while also presenting the principles of our social science history approach to understanding charity in past societies. We specify a threefold theory on giving in the past, looking at characteristics of donors, characteristics of charitable causes, and at the giving structure at large. We discuss the research design we employ to test this theory on Dutch charity in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Giving in the Golden Age, or GIGA, project.

This article presents a case study of the founders of almshouses for the elderly in the Dutch city of Leiden during the late middle ages and the early modern age. First, an overview of Leiden's almshouses is given and an assessment made of their importance for the elderly. Next, a prosopography of Leiden's almshouse founders is presented, and reasons for founding almshouses discussed, focusing on religion, status, and the support of one's nearest and dearest. This is followed by an analysis of the social class of almshouse inhabitants. This article contends that via almshouse foundations the wealthy and privileged upper classes of Dutch society looked after (distant) family members, employees and other dependants in their patronage orbit, and that almshouses thus in practice served mostly as a respectable way out of open and disgraceful poverty for members of the lower middle class and the class of wage-dependants.

This article explores the role of different social groups in early modern Dutch towns in organising and financing poor relief. Examining both the income structure of Dutch urban poor relief organisations and voluntary donations and bequests by citizens reveals what motivations lay behind their involvement, and how and why these changed over time. In the seventeenth century, ‘middle groups’ donated more often and higher mean amounts, reflecting their efforts to contribute to urban community building. In the eighteenth century, the elite became relatively more involved in charitable giving. Also, the urge to give to one's own religious group seems to have increased in this period.

In many localities in the Dutch Republic, charitable collections were the single largest source of income for relief institutions for the outdoor poor. This article takes into account both the role of the authorities organising collections and the role of the city-dwellers making charitable donations. It is demonstrated that people from almost all layers of urban society contributed to the collections. By means of thorough planning and exerting social pressure, religious and secular administrators of poor relief tried to maximise Dutch generosity. They presented making charitable donations as a duty of the rich as well as of the less well-off. In the Dutch Republic, not only the elites, but also the middling groups of society, who approximately constituted almost half of the urban population, were of vital importance in financing poor relief.

Philanthropy was enduring in early modern Europe. For centuries local charities gave small sums that helped many people to survive. Such charity can be studied from below, from the persepective of survival strategies, and from above, from the perspective of social control, but it can also be studied as scholars of philanthropic studies do for contemporary societies. This article does the latter. It pays attention to benefactors and benefactions; how many people gave and who were they?; when, where and what did benefactors give, and what were their motives? The article places an in-depth study of Amsterdam from the late sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century in the context of the literature on early modern European philanthropy.