Charitable institutions as working places, 16th-20th century

Research on the social and cultural history of the modern era has extensively studied how orphanages and hospitals collected and even locked up the poor, males and females, the orphans to save their lives, to discipline and control them. Yet, the strictly economic aspects of work within these institutions have been relatively little studied. The old opposition between a Protestant ethic that values hard work and a Catholic ethos, for which it would have been relatively secondary, seems to have long guided researchers' questions on this subject. On the contrary, we believe that this dichotomy must be reviewed and the multiple economic aspects of working in all kinds of charitable institutions that are flourishing in the Mediterranean countries must be examined again at a new cost. We have chosen to focus our attention, in this issue, which is a first approach on the subject, on the Italian Peninsula, to which four of the six articles are devoted.