Welfare reform in Frisian towns: between humanist theory, pious imperatives and government policy.

Ole Peter Grell has challenged us to examine how, in an age dominated by faith, religion shaped public and private approaches to poor relief. His thesis is twofold. Ideologically, Protestantism changed the purpose of charity — from a benefit to the souls of donors in the hereafter to the relief of the indigent in the present. In terms of practice, without the Reformation the speed and extent to which poor relief was centralized in the seventeenth century would have been unimaginable. The role of civic humanism is relegated to a second place: humanists proposed reform as an option, for good Protestants it was an obligation ...