“Poverty,” Anne M. Scott admits in the preface to Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, “is a far from simple concept” (3). Indeed, Scott and her fellow contributors initially appear to have set themselves a rather difficult task in considering the concept and implications of poverty in a book that spans two countries and four hundred years. With a goal of exploring poverty from three perspectives: evidence of poor people, evidence of ways of dealing with poor people, and literary and artistic explorations of poverty and wealth, a reader might be forgiven for fearing that Experiences of Poverty is overly ambitious in its scope. Yet such fears prove unfounded. Divided into three parts (“Survival Strategies,” “Forms of Poor Relief,” and “Textual and Visual Representations”), each of the thirteen essays in this volume explores the concept of poverty in an imaginative and inventive way, often by focusing on one or two key sources. As a result, there is much to recommend this collection, not only to those who are interested in the history of poverty but also to those seeking to learn more about gender and community relations in the medieval and early modern periods.

The essays are the result of a conference held at the University of Western Australia in 2010, and the contributors are a mix of established and emerging scholars. The first section, “Survival Strategies,” focuses on the experiences of poor people themselves. Christopher Dyer uses fourteenth-century manorial court records to construct a prosopography of the rural poor and consider their relationship to the wider community. Ultimately, he argues that “respectable villagers felt sympathy for beggars and vagabonds, and were prepared to shelter them” and that, as a result, “the gulf between conventional society and the poor ‘has been exaggerated’” (39). Phillippa Maddern uses fourteenth-century ecclesiastical court records and Chancery petitions to uncover the strategies used by poor single mothers and their children, illustrating that, in addition to working, these women often had to use the church courts to seek support from their partners. Ann Minister uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pauper apprenticeship indentures from rural English parishes to argue that these were not always a negative experience, characterized by poor treatment of apprentices. Indeed, pauper apprentices were often apprenticed to the same trades as private apprentices and had opportunities for advancement. Lesley Silvester's chapter, which discusses the experience of single women in Norwich, uses the 1570 Census of the Poor to create a prosopography of the women living in Norwich at this time. Silvester finds examples of self-sustaining women in this census, which she argues indicates a preemptory attitude on the part of the authorities as they sought to not only deal with but also anticipate future poor relief.

The second section, “Forms of Poor Relief,” focuses on how towns and townspeople sought to deal with the poor. Nicholas Brodie discusses weekly collection and distribution of corporate and parish poor relief in Norwich in the 1560s and 1570s. This chapter considers not only who received this relief but also who gave it, and the normalcy of the whole scheme to citizens. A discussion of normalcy also pervades Susan Broomhall's consideration of the politics of charitable men and how poverty was governed in sixteenth-century Paris. She argues that poor relief was affected most, not by increasing secularization, but by increasing administration and accountability; and networks were fostered by professional men who were compelled to participate in poor relief thanks to their Christian duty. Christian duty was also behind the Nevers Foundation from 1573 to 1605 in France, the focus of Lisa Keane Elliott's chapter. This foundation was designed to provide dowries for sixty poor girls from the Nevers and Rethel regions, and Elliott argues that it was used as a “weapon” in the “battle to preserve the Catholic faith” by demonstrating and encouraging Catholic loyalty (163). The last two chapters in this section consider the question of agency among the poor. The first, by Margaret Dorey, uses petitions to the Court of Aldermen in London to illustrate how prisoners in London in the early eighteenth century often did not have access to proper food and water, and how prisoners claimed rights to basic necessities. The second, by Michael Bennett, considers the choices and attitudes evident in the inoculation of the poor against small pox in eighteenth-century England.

The final section uses literary works to explore the relationship between the poor and the nonpoor. Mark Amsler's “Poverty as a Mobile Signifier” uses texts, including Jack Upland and Dives and Pauper, as well as examples of those who voluntarily entered mendicant orders, to consider the concepts of voluntary, involuntary, and virtuous poverty in the Middle Ages. The relationship between poverty and virtue is also explored by Anne Scott. She uses the poem Le levre du Chastel de labour de provrete et de richesse to evaluate the view of poverty by the wealthy and, particularly, the view that the pursuit of material wealth through hard work was, in itself, a virtue. Mike Nolan also examines the relationship between rich and poor, using Robert Daborne's play The Poor Man's Comfort to explore how the gulf between rich and poor was maintained by the manipulation and distortion of justice in early modern England, while also illustrating how justice could provide the poor with agency. Finally, Peter Denney examines the perceptions the wealthy had of the poor, using the “reformation of manners” movement (299), the enclosure movement, and the “cult of picturesque tourism” movement (307) to trace the increasing association between rural poverty and noise (especially the noise created by industry and idle conversation) in eighteenth-century Britain.

The distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor was an emerging concept over the late medieval and early modern periods in Europe, and consideration of that fraught status underpins the essays in this book. Who were the poor? How were they viewed, and assisted, by others? What was the relationship between the poor and the nonpoor? In considering these questions over a long time period and two countries, this collection ably demonstrates the importance of these questions and seeks to answer them for individual places and times. Eminently deserving of attention and consideration, the various sources and approaches used in these chapters speak to the vibrant sources and inventive approaches that can be applied to studies of poverty.