Economy in crisis. The institutional response: corporations of attention to the woman of the hispanic monarchy between the 16th and 17th centuries

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study poor women who marked the limit of indigence, who had no home and no clear or precise future in the Old Regime of the Spanish Monarchy. This female collective was exposed to poverty in the face of subsistence crises that hit them. Thus, women who were not protected by family, marriage, a convent or a precarious job were in a situation of indigence, marginalization and helplessness, being able to fall into begging or prostitution, or an unstable type of life, moving almost always around misery. The majority of people in need who requested help were these women in the form of alms, food and clothing or by requesting admission to asylum centers to which they could apply. The methodology has been to investigate in some Peruvian and Sevillian archives and through hermeneutics and heuristics obtain results that allow me to know this reality so widespread in the colonial Hispanic and metropolitan monarchy. Main conclusions: Despite the economic instability that characterized the Old Spanish Regime, testamentary wills never ceased to found patronage, delegates to institutions to help, above all, poor women, receiving dowries to set up marriages, alms to alleviate their poverty, aid to shelter them in schools, hospitals, convents, in order to protect them from moral poverty. However, the pious works that sustained these institutions, through the annual rents of the testamentary wills could disappear or fall into bankruptcy before any economic oscillation, but some survived for centuries.