Introduction

Abstract

This special issue explores how acts of giving and receiving helped shape individual and communal identities in late medieval and early modern Southern Europe. Building on scholarship on charity, community, and identity, the essays in this collection suggest that personal, collective, and state-led assistance initiatives enabled people to define and express who they were and to which communities they belonged. By tracing how charity and welfare operated within and across religious, social, and political lines, the essays reveal ways in which practices of assistance reflected and negotiated social boundaries and complicated notions of gender, faith, nationality, and socio-economic status in diverse Southern European cities. Collectively, these essays illuminate the profound entanglement between aid and self-fashioning, showing that acts of giving and receiving shaped people and communities as much as they sustained them.