Aarhus Universitets segl

Abstracts til NOS-HS Workshop III: Maria Nørby Pedersen

Maria Nørby Pedersen (Aarhus): Caring for the poor: A Christian and Kingly responsibility in early modern Denmark

With the Evangelical-Lutheran Reformation (1536), the Danish king took responsibility for the poor when he took responsibility for protecting and strengthening true Christian worship from the Roman Church. He obligated himself through law and religion to pass poor relief legislation protecting both the bodily and spiritual welfare of the poor, as well as the people’s possibility to do good Christian deeds towards their poor neighbor. Throughout the early modern period, Danish kings passed laws and regulations, sometimes called “god politi”, to uphold this responsibility for the poor and their local caretakers, and by doing so developed, centralized, and defined an administrative branch of the state. This paper will argue that poor relief legislation played a part in the emergence of the state wherewith the state pushed forward its reach and included more and more actors among the people, from the district officials to the peasants and the poor themselves, to work for the state in seeing to the many needs of the poor.