1The confraternal institutions known as misericórdias are arguably the most fascinating lay-religious institutions to emerge in the late medieval and early modern period. Often born in contexts where immediate subsistence crises co-incided with intense devotional movements, many survived long beyond their historically-contingent origins and some continue to operate today. There’s a comparative study to be made of the Misericordias of Tuscany, which emerged in Florence in 1244, spread across the region, and continue to operate hospitals and ambulance services today, and the Portuguese and Spanish misericórdias which offered a wider set of services over a larger geographical scope. While the Italian institutions barely expanding outside of Tuscany, the Portuguese misericórdias emerged just as Portugal was embarking on imperial expansion, and they supported that expansion very directly. They lasted through the course of imperial waxing and waning and continue today in some settings like Macau. There have been new foundations into the modern age; diasporic Portuguese in France established a misericórdia in Paris in 1994. And while many did disappear over time, approximately 400 misericórdias continue to exist within Portugal today.

2The leading modern historian of the Portuguese misericórdias is Isabel dos Guimarães Sá. Together with Lisbeth Rodrigues she has here gathered focused studies of those aspects of the Misericordias which are most closely connected to Portugal’s early modern imperial expansion. In Part 1, seven essays explore critical characteristics of misericórdia organization and finances, and their relations to other imperial institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical. In Part 2, five essays explore the key charitable activities undertaken by misericórdias in different international settings, particularly health care, sheltering foundlings, orphans, and abandoned children, the patriarchal care of women through enclosures and dowries, and burial of the dead.

3As we step back from the local details, what emerges is an institution which skillfully blended royal and ecclesiastical patronage with significant lay and local autonomy, becoming sufficiently independent from both that the misericórdias were not erased in the political and anti-clerical revolutions of the modern period. The misericórdias provided positive services which made them indispensable to elites, to professionals and artisans, and to labouring classes. Beyond charitable services of course, they made a considerable financial contribution providing banking services which helped poor families to save, allowed wealthy families to assemble property, shield it from taxation, and use it without penalty, and provided liquid assets that local and imperial governments could loot with impunity. Something for everyone. Their function as stores of liquid capital came out of early regulations which aimed to preserve spiritual purity by forbidding the institutions from assembling fixed assets like real estate. This forced them on to the early modern bond market, where they became skillful and seriously wealthy operators. It’s perhaps debatable whether their spiritual purity survived the exercise.

4This particular example – and there are many others – demonstrates how the misericórdias evolution followed the operation of the laws of unintended consequences. Those laws operate most actively where contingency and contradiction intersect, and the pious abstractions of charity were seldom allowed to get in the way. A key example of this in the colonial setting had to do with race and charity. Many misericórdias were firm in their rejection of miscegenation and operated their charitable institutions with racial preferences meant to protect the purity of European stock. Yet such stock proved rather hard to find, let alone protect, since Portuguese females were far less likely to emigrate than Portuguese males. The latter eagerly took up with local women across the empire and over time bent the misericórdias towards the role of sheltering their mixed-race offspring. Charity here was less the far-sighted and humane rejection of racism and enslavement, than the reluctant swallowing of contradiction in recognition of contingency. This was a recurring dynamic that allowed the misericórdias to become both somewhat less, and also far more than what their founders intended.

6The quick diffusion of misericórdia confraternities across Portugal and perhaps even more so their rapid spread through Portuguese and eventually Spanish overseas colonies underscores this aspect of building identity and cohesion and achieving a degree of sustainability through mutual assistance. The initial racial exclusions certainly underscore this purpose. The authors here pull no punches in showing how the misericórdias were firmly braided together with other secular and ecclesiastical institutions to provide the rigging that allowed Portugal’s colonialist enterprise to sail as rapidly, extensively, and effectively as it did. Recognition of reality and institutional improvisation resulted in some of these same braided ropes then being adapted to secure a colonial apparatus which shifted identity and exclusion from race to more complicated and mixed family networks.

7This is the first extended study of the Portuguese misericórdias to be published in English, and thanks to its scholarly rigour and comprehensive scope will become the standard reference work in the field. As noted above, the first group of essays lays out the institutional structures and contexts which framed their work. Inês Amorim opens with an exploration of how the misericórdias first emerge, how they are internally structured with attention to recruitment, membership requirements and expectations, and social distinctions, and how they develop in their relations with the crown, particularly in the eighteenth century. José Pedro Paiva then turns to relations with the church, and particularly to bishops and their engagement as both the sponsors and sometimes the overseers of the confraternities. Church oversight was no less contentious than state oversight, and Paiva explores the dynamic relation that unfolded as bishops aimed to continue their control over sacramental and liturgical activities after Trent while laity aimed to restrict their scope and maintain their own traditional forms.

8Lisbeth Rodrigues then considers the evolution of the sophisticated financial structures noted above, looking at how they invested revenues in credit and capital markets to the point that some became significant creditors to both the state and private individuals. Sara Pinto continues in this theme of financial management by showing how misericórdias became the vehicles for moving large sums, and in particular inheritances, from colonial settings in Asia back to the Portuguese metropole. Juan Mesquida then offers a valuable comparative look at the Spanish adoption and adaptation of the Misericórdia established in Manila during the Union of the Crowns, focusing again on its banking services and the investment resources it provided to local elites involved in the Acapulco galleon trade. Rômulo Ehalt addresses identity, ethnicity, and race by showing how the Misericórdia established in Japan during the Christian Century did not develop as preservers of Portuguese culture, but adapted to Japanese cultural forms. The first part concludes with Joana Balsa de Pinho’s comparative exploration of the structural and iconographic forms that we find on misericórdia buildings in widely different settings, seeing how a distinctive visual language of images around both charity and devotion comes to emerge across the empire.

9The second set of essays deals with issues around charity which might be more familiar to those who have studied the misericórdias. Four of the essays deal with issues at the intersection of charity and demographics, and the role of the institutions in promoting marriage and childbirth. Andreia Durães reviews the administration of hospitals and how the sick were cared for, while Renato Franco looks specifically at the care for foundlings in colonial settings. Maria Antónia Lopes shows how they built up colonial demographics with aid to marriage, while Luciana Gandelman considers the other side of marital aid – i.e., the preservation of female honour by various forms of enclosure. In the fifth essay in this group, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá considers the “economy of salvation” – i.e., the generation of funds around inheritances, masses, and funerals. Her work is the pivot or connecting point between the two sections, dealing as it does with the point at which charity, liturgy, and finance converge.

10This collection will be a standard reference for all future work on Portuguese misericórdia confraternities. Its only limitation is a disinclination to engage in comparative analysis: these are Lusophone scholars studying a Portuguese institution and with a few exceptions they engage almost exclusively with Lusophone scholarship. It’s unfortunate that the opportunities for comparisons with similar institutions elsewhere have not been more fully explored, since the Portuguese institutions seem to have extended other European models in significant ways. The work here on their range of proto-banking operations from credit and investment to funds transfer and insurance moves beyond the Tuscan Misericordias and recalls institutions like the various pawnbanks (monti) in Italy, France, and Flanders which evolved into banks. There is no reference to that work or comparison with the phenomena elsewhere, just as there is very little engagement with or even reference to the larger body of comparative work on charity. This scholarly insularity unfortunately leaves the Portuguese misericórdias looking isolated, parochial and limited. Their broader historical importance would be far more firmly established through comparative analysis that would explore distinctions between the Portuguese and other European models and underscore the greater contribution the former made to early modern banking as critical lynchpins of colonial capitalist development.