Paul Fideler's elegant book weaves together some fifty years of scholarship on the problem of poverty in English history. This is no common synthesis but, rather, a hard-grappling analysis of main currents in English social thought. Fideler smuggles in original material, too, especially on the contribution of high-minded humanist ethics lodged in Tudor and Stuart pamphlet debate. A clearly articulated revisionist perspective informs the author's choice of boundaries and cast of characters, making this volume engaging and even suspenseful in its tour through a dense field of scholarship.

Lurking around the edges of poor law history is the suggestion that certain cultural values have a transhistorical character, even in this era of postmodern constructionism. Fideler begins his examination of the longue durée of poor law history in the late fourteenth century, when a Cambridge statute codified earlier laws on the migration of labor, wages, and the treatment of beggars. Every element of this statute remains vital for the next four hundred years, including its reliance on the parish as the primary site of alms distribution. Fideler's particular interest, however, is in the persistence of principles of classical philosophy that applied to issues of social welfare, such as ethical debates derived from the philosopher Seneca and the humanist values embodied in Thomas More's Utopia. His early chapters establish two key concepts: the notions of “commonwealth policy,” or civitas (which becomes statism in a later era), and societas (a general ethical concern for the body politic that inspires voluntary action), which help to account for myriad combinations of regulation and relief between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. As Fideler's title betrays, he has integrated the scholarly concept of a “mixed economy of welfare,” often used in reference to the modern period, into the early modern period with considerable effectiveness. At the same time, his narrative carries forward concepts from the late medieval period, such as hospitality and neighborliness, into the early eighteenth century. This approach is particularly useful if one is seeking to compare the English model of poor relief to the approaches of other European nations.

Fideler's main contention is that the English adopted a “big tent” (131) approach to addressing the needs of the weaker members of society from the seventeenth century onward. Included in this capacious coverage was parish-based relief in kind, rents, medical care, and cash; charitable giving by wealthy members of society; foundation support in the form of hospitals and almshouses; and the not-so-rosy resort to the workhouse. Building on the findings of John Broad, Lynn Botelho, Paul Slack, and Steve Hindle, Fideler shows how recent scholarship has developed a more sanguine view of the achievements of parish relief by situating it within a broader context. Fideler's ideological framework is similarly inclusive. In a nice section entitled “Custom's Ideology,” he combines the work of Bob Bushaway, John Walter, and James C. Scott in order to show how the notion of a “public transcript” (121) illuminates the linkage between national and local commitment to provide for the poor.

Fideler's own sanguine outlook is salutary, and it is put to splendid use in a sustained attention to the continuance of societas under other guises. Building on the work of Margot Todd, Keith Wrightson, and others, Fideler teases out the meanings of Seneca's phrase a “commerce of benefits,” which referred to the way in which elites might communicate well-being and welfare to the general laboring poor through ties of friendship and mutuality. The philosophical coherence of the Stoic texts, pondered and committed to memory by Oxford undergraduates and country gentlemen, provided compelling ethical debates over the rightness of aiding the poor. These were “arts of sociability not statecraft” (117): they required cultivation on a daily basis and could not be legislated or performed by proxy through the payment of rates. Such vertical ties, Fideler points out, encouraged similar-minded horizontal ties of neighborliness and friendship. Given this framework, the reader will easily make sense of recent scholarship on credit, another aspect of the financial strategizing of the poor.

Community-oriented generosity, which Fideler demonstrates so ably through relatively unknown sixteenth-century authors such as Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Harman, apparently diminishes or changes form by the later period. Somewhat ominous notes are struck in Samuel Hartlib's London's Charity enlarged in 1650. Remaining nonpartisan, Fideler offers voices like that of Thomas Alcock in 1752 as evidence of an awareness that the old system was straining to keep up with a growing number of the poor. But Alcock's hard-bitten complaints seem to exhibit new animus against the poor, along with a hefty self-regard and stinginess that were inimical to charitableness at midcentury. That Alcock proposed “multi-purpose workhouses” (155) seems to signal a new frame of mind that, if recognized and analyzed, would help to explain the appearance of Thomas Malthus at the end of the century. Considering what we know about eighteenth-century philanthropy through the work of Donna Andrew, Sarah Lloyd, and others, perhaps Fideler might have added vanitas to his two key concepts, to great advantage. The cupidity of the eighteenth century, to my mind, overtakes the community-centered mentality of the earlier age and creates a third pole to which writers are drawn, though perhaps without admitting it.

Fideler's voice generates this sort of debate with winning immediacy and candor. The volume is a wonderful achievement. It may serve to invite younger scholars to engage with poor law history with renewed analytical verve. And more than only students will be indebted to this book; with luck, it will make every reader a student again, which is no bad thing.