Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden. By Timothy G. Fehler. Aldershot, Ashgate, 1999. Pp. xiii, 332. £55.00.

Extract

For a decade, thanks to the works of Heinz Schilling (Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1991) and Andrew Pettegree (Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), we have known about the extensive network of poor relief that characterized Emden during the second half of the sixteenth century, a time when the town's importance for Reformed Protestant refugees from the Netherlands proved so paramount. This book, however, provides the first detailed analysis of how this wide-ranging system of social welfare came into existence and how it operated. Timothy Fehler starts his story before the Reformation, with a survey of late-medieval charity in Emden, before dealing with the system poor relief that was introduced in the period immediately after the city was officially reformed in 1529. This was clearly a Reformation from the top, introduced by Count Enno II along Lutheran lines and managed by Lutheran preachers imported from Bremen. Despite confiscating most goods and income belonging to the Catholic Church, and despite providing general instructions for the financing of a system of poor relief in East Frisia and Emden in his Protestant Church Ordinance of 1529, Count Enno did not provide any funds for the poor from his secularization of church properties; nor did he introduce a common chest, normally a significant part of Lutheran social reforms. It was simply left to lay parish officials, as supervisors of the poor, to collect from their fellow citizens what they considered necessary. Not surprisingly, many of the medieval Catholic institutions (such as the Franciscans) and a number of confraternities (such as the St. Clement's Shippers Brotherhood) continued to play a significant part in providing relief for the city's poor for decades after the Reformation.