Looking at Catholic charity and social policy in past times, this book focuses on 'unrespectable' women and children in Italy, and their treatment at the hands of charities and the law. It looks at prostitutes and women engaged in sexual relationships outside formal marriage, and foundlings, many of whom were abandoned because they were born out of wedlock.A wide-ranging synoptic survey, this study considers the practical complications and consequences of communities' decisions to ...

Frank and entertaining account of the University of Manchester's struggle to meet the Government’s demands for the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1950s and the 1960s. Looks at the University's ambitious building program: the controversial attempts to reform its constitution and improve its communications amid demands for greater democracy in the workplace, the struggle to retain its old pre-eminence in a competitive world where new ‘green field’ universities were rivalling olde...

Although welfare reform is currently the government's top priority, most discussions about the public's responsibility to the poor neglect an informed historical perspective. This important book provides a crucial examination of past attempts, both in this country and abroad, to balance the efforts of private charity and public welfare. The prominent historians in this collection demonstrate how solutions to poverty are functions of culture, religion, and politics, and how social provision...

The decline of Venice remains one of the classic episodes in the economic development of modern Europe. Its contrasts are familiar enough: the wealthiest commercial power in fifteenth-century Europe, the strongest western colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean, found its principal fame three centuries later in carnival and the arts. This metamorphosis from commercial hegemony to fashionable pleasure and landed wealth was, however, a complex process. It resulted not so much from the Po...