Hospitals as a Way of Life. Regulations and Instructions

Hospitals belong to the essential features of medieval and early modern towns; chiefly, their own citizens were admitted into them, and the town councils could prove their buon governo by running a hospital successfully. These hospitals often formed the most important economic enterprises of the towns, administrating landed estates as well as providing infrastructure, but also storing cereals and wine for provisioning their inmates and staff. Due to this high significance, but also to ensure an orderly co-existence, hospitals became objects of many rules and regulations concerning their interior order, their inmates, personnel and clergy. The voluminous publication edits 203 such items covering all of the Austrian territories from the Late Middle Ages to the 19th century. Hospital rules, instructions for hospital staff, job descriptions, special rules as, for example, prayer orders and dietaries, but also inventories were meant to channel the way of life of inmates and staff, and are proof of the close monitoring of urban hospitals by town councils, but also by the sovereign. Up to now, neither hospital rules nor instructions without doubt important means of governance over institutions have been sufficiently researched in a systematic and comprehensive way. Each of the edited sources is accompanied by a survey on the history of the hospital and a comment contextualising the contents, which necessitated pioneering archival research in many cases where no serious scholarly treatment of the hospitals history was available. The volume will also contain three indexes of persons, places and subjects (which will be prepared when the proofs are ready) and will provide the material for a second volume, due to offer the first comprehensive overview on the Austrian hospitals in the early modern period, their life and their administration.