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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/03
"To Heal the Sick" : Women As Creators of Civil Society in Pre-Modern Poland
Wladyslaw Roczniak
December 2000
Abstract
Philanthropy and voluntarism comprise a branch of historical studies that is currently blossoming. The recent collapse of Communism and the democratization of Eastern Europe have added stimulus to such studies. However, it must be sadly stated that the quantity of American historical scholarship has yet to catch up with the increased demand for research in these fields. Whereas many research associations have approached voluntarism from both a local and a global perspective, most published American literature has lagged far behind. American historians have largely ignored the exciting new horizon opening up in Eastern European studies on traditional charity and civil society creation. This is unfortunate. Eastern European voluntarism has long existed and our analysis of the similarities and differences between Western and Eastern European conceptions and practices would add greatly to our understanding of social and religious forces behind our cultures of sharing and giving.
Modern studies pertaining to civil society are often subdivided into categories, each dealing with a topic separate and distinct from the totality of questions raised by voluntarism. One of the more important of such topics is the question of women and their involvement in the creation and propagation of our cultures of giving and receiving. Tracing the history of female philanthropy is an exciting and informative exposition of cultural attitudes towards the place and role of charity in a particular civil society. Female cultural roles have undergone tremendous changes in the past centuries; tracing these cultural alterations not only provides an uncanny insight into female responsibilities in a given society, but also, and this is of great importance to students of philanthropy, can offer access to gender based definitions of charitable endeavors.
The lack of Western historical scholarship is especially apparent when it comes to the question of women's roles in the creation and propagation of civil society. And yet any exploration of Eastern European women's history will uncover new and exiting historiographical approaches. Whereas Western scholarship lacks in historical study of medieval and early modern Polish women, and thus makes it difficult to formulate even general statements of similarity or distance from Western models, Polish historical writing since the 1970s has concentrated on the positive aspects of the women's question. At a time when most Western European women were not allowed to become full-fledged members of lay or religious brotherhoods, a majority of those who joined Polish confraternities as individuals were in fact women.
This paper, based on extensive bibliographic research, presents key roles played by pre-modern (12th to 18th centuries) Polish women in the propagation of culturally-based charitable mores, both as donors and receivers of charity. The most widely spread, major organized institution of mercy in medieval and early-modern Poland was the hospital. For this reason, this paper concentrates, from the donor's point of view, on women's roles in founding, maintaining and administering hospitals and, from the receiver's point of view, on charitable provisions made available by hospitals to poor women. Charitable founding of hospitals and churches has been one of the more favored forms of alms giving for female patrons. Donations of time and money have poured from 13th-century Silesian princesses and 16th-century widows of Krakow's greatest citizens. There hardly existed an urban hospital that did not enjoy the patronage of the female members of Polish society. Based on surviving documents, wills, monastery necrologies and urban confraternity charters, it is possible to delineate the extent and importance of female involvement with pre-modern Polish hospitals and through a few select case studies to illuminate the woman's role in civil-society creation.
This analysis of hospitals and their role in pre-modern Polish female charity offers the Western scholar a fuller historical picture of the Eastern European philanthropic environment. Studying hospital creation and administration helps uncover the important roles pre-modern women played in the establishment of viable mechanisms that eventually lead to the creation of civil society. It is similarly important to trace the philanthropic and social changes to which such women responded. Together, the results of such studies go far to provide a bases to alter the traditional view of pre-modern Eastern European charity as principally the work of urban male elites. The role of women in the establishment of Polish charitable and social-welfare instruments is undeniable and long lasting. It is thus necessary to bring these important concepts to the forefront of today's debates about the establishment of a "European" pattern of social welfare and civil society. No longer should European philanthropy end at the river Elbe, no longer should accounts of "European" charity limit themselves to Western European male elite notions.
