The sources produced and preserved by ecclesiastical and religious bodies (including confraternities and hospitals, once governed by canon law) have been of the utmost importance for the economic and social history of pre-industrial Europe, especially for Italy, which until the 16th century was the heart of Western Christendom (Cipolla 1988; Cammarosano 1991). The use of this wealth of sources has often been functional to the study of phenomena in their collective dimension; much less to the history of entities per se. Nevertheless, the administrators of ecclesiastical institutions and “luoghi pii” acted in the market with different criteria than those followed by secular aristocracies and entrepreneurial classes, given the peculiar legal regime that framed the assets of these institutions. In modern-age Italy, it took a large portion of real estate holdings out of the market; hence the nineteenth-century “suppressions” and confiscations had a relevant economic impact.
Since the 1990s, scholars have begun to reflect on the quantity and quality of the Church’s wealth and on the administrative and management methods of its patrimony. In 1997, CISSA of Pistoia organized a conference on ‘Gli spazi economici della Chiesa nell’Occidente mediterraneo (secoli XII-metà XIV)’; in 2003, the Italian Association of Professors of Church History promoted a meeting on ‘Chiesa e denaro tra Cinquecento e Settecento: possesso, uso, immagine’.
On one hand, the role of great monasteries in their relationship with resources and rural environments in the economic and demographic context of the 12th-15th centuries was analyzed (Salvestrini 1998), while for the modern age the interest focused mainly on “the use of money” by “luoghi pii” (Garbellotti – Pastore 2001). Moments of strong connection between the ethical-religious sphere on one hand and economic-social issues on the other have been established by some recent strands of studies. The first, concerning the theme of “Welfare before Welfare,” focuses on the history of assistance and hospitals between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Gazzini and Olivieri 2016; Piccinni 2020); the second has to do with the role played by the Monti di Pietà and assimilated institutions in Italy in the 15th-18th centuries (Muzzarelli 2001; Delcorno and Zavattero 2020); the third concerns the relationship between Church and market, between the mechanism of production and exchange on one hand and theology and canon law on the other (Todeschini 2002 and 2021; Prodi 2009).
For the pre-unification Italy, studies have focused on the patrimonial management of diocesan canteens. The case of the Tuscan Grand Duchy is emblematic in light of the legacy of eighteenth-century jurisdictionalism (Lupano 2015). Ecclesiastical patrimoniality remains central to the historiographical debate on the liberal age, as it was affected by the State/Church cleavage inherited from the Risorgimento (Pertici 2009).
