Lay Women in the Hospitals of Late Medieval Bergamo

Throughout Italian cities in the later Middle Ages, civic and ecclesiastical authorities consolidated small hospitals primarily designed to house the sick, poor, and other social marginals into large institutions with a mandate to provide professional medical care to the entire community. In many cities in northern Italy, hospital restructuring was accompanied by the establishment of provveditori di sanità - guardians of public health - to oversee the medical profession and prevent outbreaks of plague. These changes were preceded by several decades of reform measures designed to bring hospitals more effectively under the control of civic and ecclesiastical authorities. Traditionally, historians have presented this period of reform as the triumph of Renaissance rationality over defective, corrupt medieval institutions. Examining hospital reform through the lens of gender complicates that view by revealing that the reform of medieval hospitals was accompanied by ambivalence among authorities towards the activities of lay women who had previously lived undisturbed within the institutions. Tracing the reasons for changes to perceptions of women in hospitals forces us to redefine the effects of hospital reform at the end of the Middle Ages.