| Paper 109-b | Pauperes?: On the Flexibility of a Concept - Students and Pilgrims
(Language: English)
Christian Krötzl, School of Social Sciences & Humanities, History & Philosophy, University of Tampere
Index terms: Daily Life, Ecclesiastical History, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Social History |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
The wills enrolled by London's drapers in the city's Commissary Court from 1350 to 1485 are remarkably attuned to the urban poor: nearly fifty percent make provisions specifically for 'pauperes'. But the small amounts bequeathed, often hardly a day's provisions, and stipulations for services or connections to the testator, evince a carefully circumscribed definition of the deserving poor. The wills convey two approaches to London's poor: first, the bequest's primary intention as an expression of the testator's own piety, and second, conditions attached to the gift as legitimization of the 'pauper' and as a prescription for a specific model of poverty.
Paper -b:
Pauper is a terminus which appears regularly in the matriculae of medieval universities, when defining the amount of inscription or exam fees to be payed by students. What does it mean, how poor were these students in reality, when compared to other groups in society? Pauper was also a denomination we find sometimes in documentary and other sources on long-distance-pilgrimages. What does it mean in this context and when compared to poors in other social layers and groups?
Paper -c:
There were various ways through which 'poor' students gained access to a university education in the high and late Middle Ages. Most colleges were originally founded to provide board and lodging for students of lesser means. The Church could also facilitate university study by granting a church benefice from which the holder would be allowed absentia for the explicit purpose of studying at a university. Many an ambitious clergyman of modest means made his way in the hierarchy of the Church in this fashion. An interesting but less studied method of financing university studies were the so called bursae volantes, 'flying grants', not attached to a particular college or hall, instituted by individuals or institutions to send a certain number of students to a university. The present paper examines the motives of the founders (both individual and institutional) and the criteria attached to a number of these bursae volantes from the Northern Netherlands in the late Middle Ages. This will allow us to assess their significance as a means of financing 'poor' students' visits to universities and to shed light on the importance attached by the founders to education as a possible means of social mobility.
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