Introduction: New Perspectives on Public Services in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue that explores public services in early modern Europe. It advocates a broad definition of early modern public services: all public facilities provided by (semi-) governments, churches, religious organizations, civic institutions, and individual citizens. Such a definition is more appropriate because most late medieval and early modern towns were civil societies in which services were provided and financed by myriad agencies, institutions, corporations, and individuals who were part of the city. Early modern public services were thus shaped and formed by conceptions of common good, citizenship, and urban community. Such characteristics were by no means static. Reallocations of facilities in premodern cities resulted from a complex set of demographic, economic, social, political, and personal causes. Although significant changes in the system of provisioning occurred during the early modern period, such alterations were always firmly rooted in traditional conceptions of how the common interest should be best served.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.