Nuevas formas de hacer historia de la pobreza y de la beneficencia

Abstract

This paper is a critical inquiry into the prevailing tendencies in contemporary Spanish historiography concerning the history of poverty and charity. It suggests the incorporation of the main contributions of the social and cultural history of recent years, inter alia from gender studies, against a historiography of structuralist perspective linked to a socioeconomic conception of the matter. It results in the history of poverty and charity in which the main characters are the poor themselves as the recipients of social work and not as the driving forces of welfare institutions and their aims of social control.