Vives’ tract of 1526 on the reform of urban charity and welfare, addressed to the citizens of Bruges, is a familiar landmark in the history of European social policy. Henri Pirenne viewed Vives’ tract and the reforms at Ypres in 1525 as evidence of a broader movement inspired ...
(Show more)Vives’ tract of 1526 on the reform of urban charity and welfare, addressed to the citizens of Bruges, is a familiar landmark in the history of European social policy. Henri Pirenne viewed Vives’ tract and the reforms at Ypres in 1525 as evidence of a broader movement inspired by “Erasmians, jurists, and capitalists.” Historians have generally recognized that sixteenth-century initiatives for welfare reform did not begin with Vives’ De Subventione Pauperum: sive de Humanis Necessitatibus, but they continue to assign significance to this text as the expression of a newly comprehensive conception of civic responsibility for poor relief. They note its reception by contemporaries such as the founders of the Aumône-Générale of Lyon in the 1530s.
This paper will focus on the Juan Luis Vives’ contribution to social thought as a product of his personal involvement in the intellectual, spiritual and political agenda of Christian humanism. To this movement he brought the experience of a converso merchant family from Valencia. Immersed in the urban milieu of Bruges and the scholarly precints of the University of Louvain, he gained a short-lived but intense introduction to Oxford and to the court of Henry VIII through the patronage of Thomas More.
The paper will make two claims for the significance of Vives’ positions on charitable reform. The first reaffirms the significant link that his thought establishes between religious reform and the spheres of politics and society in what might be termed “the Erasmian moment.” Drawing from Saint Augustine and Cicero, from the New Testament and the Old, he articulated a civic obligation to relieve human need through the legitimate exercise of civil authority and justified his argument from Scripture.
The second claim is that Vives’ distinctive development of Erasmian humanism in the domain of poor relief can serve as a point of reference for later epochs of European welfare reform. Although Vives’ language of Christian humanism finds no place in the secular framework of modern welfare states, the development of social citizenship owes a substantial debt to the ethos of governance articulated in the two parts of his treatise.
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