Lyon et ses pauvres au moyen-âge (1350–1500)

NICOLE GONTHIER, Lyon et ses pauvres au moyen-age (1350-1500), Lyons, Editions L'Hermes, 1978, 8vo, pp. 271, illus., F.5 1.00 (paperback). This study is inspired by a desire to reveal those who have been "hidden from history" using whatever documents are available for the period. Relying heavily on wills, church archives, and fiscal documents, Gonthier has skilfully reconstructed the changing material situation of the poor, as well as the place of poverty in the medieval world-view. Gonthier's central thesis is that by the sixteenth century a new attitude towards the poor had emerged in Lyons which took a critical moral stance towards them, denigrated their usefulness and value in the social order, and portrayed them as dangerous and potentially subversive. She contrasts this with the prevailing belief of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the religious significance of poverty and the acceptance of the large numbers of "Christ's poor" who filled the city. Those with property and money were exceedingly generous in their charity, often in the form of handouts (food, clothing, money) at their funerals or on the anniversaries of their deaths. Gonthier detected unease about the poor beginning in the fifteenth century, partly because of their association with revolt and insurrection in times of economic hardship but also because of their role in spreading epidemics. The fear of contagion, she suggests, played a significant role in the willingness of the citizens of Lyons to allow the secular town administration to take over the task of organized poor relief from small, scattered religious foundations and individual bequests. Thus, for Gonthier, secularization and centralization went hand in hand with a hardening of attitudes towards the poor, and feeling that poverty indicated failure rather than a gift from God. Thus the rich, in a period of prosperity, felt entitled to their wealth, and no longer used elaborate bequests to the poor as a route to salvation. The strength of this book is the way in which the economic, demographic, social, and cultural aspects of poverty are woven together to form a vivid and detailed narrative. Its weakness lies in its lack of rigorous analysis and in the limitations of a local study which needs to be put in a more general context for its full significance to emerge. L. J. Jordanova Department of History University of Essex