The traditional historiography on charities has had a limited focus on the vicissitudes of bequests and charitable organizations, but Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos works here with a much wider lens. The Culture of Giving is concerned less with organized giving than with the social and cultural history of exchange as it is most broadly defined. Family relationships, kin networks, patronage ties, occupational organizations, the micropolitics of the parish: all of these involved relationships characterized by the reciprocity of gift exchanges. Even the growing market economy of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served not, as has been claimed, to undermine but rather to enhance the ubiquitous and multifaceted culture of giving in early modern England.
Although the book begins with a brief, helpful overview of classical sociological approaches to gift exchange (e.g., works by Marcel Mauss and Avner Offer), it quickly moves into a deeply empirical examination of the many forms of gift giving that thrived in this period, and the theoretical angle subsequently is submerged. Ben-Amos divides the work into three sections. The first analyzes informal support in different social spaces: the family, the household, social networks, parishes, and associations. In the second section, she looks at the economy of giving—that is, the way that reciprocal exchange was cultivated and reinforced through various cultural norms and media. This section has not only fascinating case studies but also some very significant use of more recent work on the economy of credit, such as that by Craig Muldrew and Margot Finn. The third part contains the most sustained attention to the question of change over time; in particular, it is concerned to unpack the effects of shifts in the boundaries regarding informal giving that were created by the growth of the state as well as the development of a market economy.
One of the great strengths of the work is its original and imaginative use of sources that one would not necessarily connect with this topic. Ben-Amos uses not only a quantitative analysis of testamentary bequests and the records of charitable associations of London livery companies but also an array of Old Bailey Sessions Papers, parish accounts, family diaries, and letters and a host of well-digested secondary sources. With this immense range of materials, she is able to paint an illuminating picture of the myriad ways in which all people in the early modern rural and urban worlds could be connected to family, kin, and neighbors through an extraordinarily well-developed culture of exchange. As Ben-Amos shows, the “dynamics of gift exchange with its binding (if never wholly confident) commitments was indispensable for the sustenance of all social networks” (80).
Even the onset of the Elizabethan poor relief system (from 1601), often seen as signaling the demise of informal giving, is here shown to have enhanced rather than undermined social and economic ties characteristic of gift exchange. Craft guilds, too, usually seen as waning throughout the last half of the early modern period, are seen to have continued as a particularly vibrant locus of assistance, sociability, and connections. Rather than decaying in the eighteenth century, the London livery companies continued to have a sustained and marked impact on the lives of the working population in the city. On top of the continued importance of these societies, the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the rise of new mutual aid societies, which were both a link to past forms of sociability and a sign of new organizations to come. Friendly societies, whether associated with a particular trade or focused on a social or local group, offered vital help for those who sought to avoid formal poor relief when faced with sickness, unemployment, old age, or widowhood. Contrary to older views, then, voluntary giving within such close-knit groups became both more vibrant and more diversified in the second half of the early modern period.
Similarly, a wide array of charitable giving thrived in this period: testamentary bequests to family and community remained of central importance; lifetime gifts, especially to institutions like hospitals and almshouses, were ubiquitous; norms of feasting and hospitality continued; and new forms of associational philanthropy came to maturity. This work conclusively demonstrates the durability of informal giving after the Reformation.
What explains the extraordinary resiliency and ubiquity of this culture of giving? Ben-Amos demonstrates the depth of cultural norms obliging the people of early modern England to give of their time and resources: “what appeared to be a unilateral sacrifice of resources was upheld by social interactions and dynamics of interchange that compelled the participants to engage in the provision of support” (145). From the unequal exchange characteristic of n the level of Samuel Pepys, who noted 120 occasions when guests dined at his house in the year 1666 alone), can be seen to have linked participants in webs of conviviality, friendship, and support. Hospitality was given with expectations not only of reciprocal hosting but also of continued loyalty and service. When we look for the “rewards” of giving, then, we need to look not only at the obvious forms of reciprocal gifting, patronage, and so on, but also to the role of deference as a social reward and to the use of gifts as status signifiers.
Far more than instrumental or utilitarian, this vast array of exchanges served to enhance not only public honor and esteem but also a person's view of self. Diaries and even Old Bailey Ordinary's accounts reveal the ways in which participation in the culture of the gift could enhance self-esteem. The Protestant world of early modern England supported a broad range of formulations and understandings of charitable giving. The imperative to give was promoted in funeral sermons, catechistic literature, and even popular newspapers, so that by 1700, the discourse of giving was clearly articulated and elaborated: “variegated formulations that oscillated between unilateral giving and reciprocal gifts, between boundless liberality [and contrastingly] … prudence and discrimination” (273) all were visible in many types of publication.
Of course, such a complex and ubiquitous dynamic was subject to misinterpretation, abuse, and friction, and Ben-Amos does a brilliant job of analyzing cases in which such friction was evident. She shows that there were important gender differences in the experiences of life within the culture of giving, although gender is not a particular focus of this book. Perhaps most important, women had a different experience than did men of work and guild life, and they occupied a different space in family and kin networks. In all of these centers of reciprocal exchange, women's possibilities and limits were distinct from those of men. Their exclusion from guild life (for most) left them, for example, outside of the reach of guild pensions and deprived them of key forms of social capital.
The ubiquity of informal giving intersected in numerous ways with the shifting boundaries of the early modern state, law courts, and officials of both the national and the local scenes. Rather than seeing such interactions as conflicting or subversive, Ben-Amos stresses the ways in which such official realms could enhance and complement, as well as restrict, the world of informal giving. Similarly, gift exchange and the market economy “interpenetrated” (353) over the course of the early modern period.
Ben-Amos's work adds new shades of meaning to many familiar forms of social interaction in the early modern period. It links aspects of this cultural world that are rarely examined together, demanding that we understand the reciprocal exchanges and relationships that existed just below the surface of the interactions of family, kin, and neighbors, often obscured to historians’ views but nonetheless tangible to the participants in such exchanges. The question of how these interactions and meanings changed over time is not always clearly marked by the author. In some chapters, one can lose the sense of chronology, especially because of the heavy focus on the seventeenth century, at the expense of the sixteenth and the eighteenth. More attention to the theoretical writings on the culture of the gift within this text would also have been most welcome. Ben-Amos's footnotes are very useful in this regard, but the more complex theoretical thinking that underpins her understanding of early modern giving is sometimes buried within these dense notes, when readers would have benefited by seeing this research more fully integrated into the text itself. Even so, the thick descriptions and evocative examples that saturate this text will allow early modern historians to understand the centrality of informal giving within virtually every aspect of the social and cultural history of this period.
