Call for papers 2027 – 1st Semester

HISTÓRIA - REVISTA DA FLUP - NUMBER 17, 1st semester, IV Series, 2027

Call for papers open until 31 January 2027

Thematic Issue: “Contested Charity: Institutions, Agency and the Poor from the Middle Ages to the Present”

Issue Coordinator:

Lisbeth Rodrigues (Faculty of Arts – University of Porto)

The way a society protects those in situations of vulnerability (the poor, the sick, children, the elderly, migrants) reveals, today as in the past, its priorities and its inequalities. The historiography of poverty and relief is rooted in the foundational work of Michel Mollat, who established the ambivalence between the “holiness” of the poor and their growing suspicion; of Bronisław Geremek, on the mechanisms of marginalisation of the poor in preindustrial Europe; and of Brian Pullan, who demonstrated the role of confraternities and Catholic Reform. The social-control readings that dominated until the 1980s have since been challenged by more recent historiography, which has treated the poor and those receiving relief as agents of an “economy of makeshifts,” and has attended to the plural motives of donors and benefactors.

To these foundational readings, four innovative lines of research have since been added: the idea of a mixed economy of welfare, which rejects a rigid opposition between private charity and public relief; attention to the agency and voice of relief recipients, read “against the grain” in petitions, admission records and institutional registers; the material and spatial turn, which treats buildings, objects, clothing and bodies as sources; and dialogue with the histories of the body, gender and disability, to which digital humanities have more recently been added, with databases of relief recipients, digital prosopography and historical mapping of spaces of care. These developments also speak to questions that cut across the 2030 Agenda (poverty, health, gender, inequality and inclusive institutions); in engaging with them, the dossier aims above all to question the historical roots of the persistence of these social inequalities. This thematic dossier therefore favours an approach that treats relief as a plural system, negotiated and contested between the Church, the Crown, the State, municipalities, local elites and the poor themselves, in which material culture, the body and gender serve as lenses of analysis.

The dossier welcomes proposals on any of the periods named in the title and from any geography, European or otherwise, including comparative studies across regions, empires and religious and cultural traditions.

Thematic axes:

  1. Institutions and the circulation of models: foundation, reform, secularisation and closure; institutional networks and governance; circulation between Europe, the Atlantic and the imperial space(s).
  2. The agency of relief recipients: the strategies, negotiation and resistance of those who received aid.
  3. The body, gender and vulnerability: illness, disability, widowhood and sexuality.
  4. Material culture and spaces of care: architecture, objects, food, visual and documentary sources.
  5. Childhood and old age: abandonment, the circulation of children, ageing and dependency.
  6. Digital humanities and new sources: databases of relief recipients, digital prosopography, historical mapping, digitised archives.

Case studies of specific institutions (confraternities, Misericórdias, hospitals, leper houses, almshouses, foundling hospitals, among others) are equally welcome, provided they engage with one or more thematic axes.

 

The journal welcomes submissions of original articles in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. Contributions to the “Other Studies” and “Book Reviews” sections are also invited.

Manuscripts should be submitted through the journal’s online platform, in accordance with the author guidelines available here. All articles undergo double-blind peer review.

For further information, please contact the editorial team at revista.historia.dhepi@letras.up.pt