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Poor women and parish public health in sixteenth‐century L ondon
Author(s) -
Munkhoff Richelle
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/rest.12080
Subject(s) - poor relief , vagrancy , plague (disease) , scholarship , poverty , public health , argument (complex analysis) , history , health care , watson , sociology , economic growth , political science , medicine , law , nursing , economics , ancient history , computer science , natural language processing
While there is much excellent scholarship on the topics of poor relief and plague management in E ngland, less attention has been paid to how they function together, especially given that they were housed in the same administrative unit of the parish. This article focuses on one key area of overlap: the medical labour performed by poor women as nurses or ‘keepers’ for their neighbours and as ‘searchers’ for epidemiological purposes in the period 1560–1600. Examining primarily parish records, such as churchwardens’ account books and vestry minutes, I make a three‐fold argument: first, women's labour became systematized as part of charitable parish care, as keeping duties rose to the level of visible economic exchange; second, the labour of keeping provided the foundation for the development of women's roles as plague searchers; and third, together those roles indicate a deliberate structure implemented in London to confront issues of public health (poverty, vagrancy, epidemics) that is worth considering in its own right.