The Local Logics of Long-Distance Charity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Germany: Thinking Beyond the Weberian Reformation

This presentation draws upon research for a project, which charts the history of Protestant charity as it developed in post-Reformation Germany from the sixteenth into the early-nineteenth centuries. With a perspective focused on the longue durée, this project challenges the dominant line of argument in much of the scholarship on charity focusing upon the first generation of Protestant reformers. Historians examining the early stages of Lutheranism and Calvinism have argued that Protestant leaders sought to replace private alms with more centralized, institutionalized forms of civic welfare. Evangelical theologians and magisterial reformers distinguished sharply between the “deserving poor” (e.g., the sick, the elderly, the disabled) and the so-called “able-bodied beggar,” who was now perceived as an idle rogue or swindler disqualified from the community’s generosity. Accordingly, the state absorbed charitable activities, rationalized them, and made them more exclusionary. Yet, if we extend our perspective beyond the first generation of Protestant reformers, we begin to see an alternative narrative. In the 1600s and 1700s, an uneven and yet steady process of regionalization and globalization took place in Protestant charitable activities, which built upon the local and parochial institutions of state welfare. Empathy for others thus moved from a disciplinary strategy, in which local women and men could be turned into good, productive citizens at home, to becoming a way of re-conceptualizing and re-mapping the (often unequal and uneven) relationships between the local and the foreign.  This presentation aims to chart for a general audience this significant development and interpret its historical meanings for both early-modern German cities and a wider network of global actors, institutions, and relationships.

Duane J. Corpis is the author of Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800 (2014), which recently won the Southern Historical Association's Charles Smith Book Award in European History. He is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU and was recently a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Forschungszentrum Gotha of the University of Erfurt. He has published on confession and conversion in early modern Germany, the politics of space and place, and the gendered dynamics of pilgrimage reform in the Enlightenment. His current interests include two projects: the history of pre-industrial noise and the global expansion of Protestant charitable projects during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In September 2015, he will begin a new position as Professor of Early Modern European and Global History at New York University in Shanghai.