Burdened with small children” : Women defining poverty in sixteenth-century Tours

Thus opens the first of the loose sheets and surviving records in the archives of the municipal poor relief system in Tours. The plights experienced by the poor of Tours, and their claims for relief, are carefully recorded in all their individual detail by the administrators of urban charity. Original pauper letters are pinned and filed, with accompanying testimonies of friends, family, medical or religious officials and neighbors, documentation of the council’s deliberations on the case, and finally handwritten receipts of payment for each recipient of their charity. Pauper letters, or the council’s transcription record of them, are a rich source of documentation about how the poor experienced life in the sixteenth century and how they persuaded benefactors to provide them assistance. This essay explores the particular forms and persuasion used by female supplicants before the poor relief council of Tours in the second half of the sixteenth century.