| In the first half of the fourth century CE, church leaders, heads of state, monks, lay Christians and Jews all began to provide charitable care for the destitute poor and sick in the form of food, shelter, medical care, baths, burial and alms in hospitals, hospices and shelters for the poor after the legalization of Christianity under Constantine I made possible the institutionalization of biblical charity on a large scale. Part 2 of this dissertation consists of literary references to 297 individual institutions founded around the Mediterranean and in the western Middle East from the fourth to the seventh century collected from architectural surveys, histories and chronicles, saints' lives, letters, sermons, inscriptions and papyri writer primarily in Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic and accompanied by English translations and excavation results where available. Part I consists of the historical and statistical analyses of a relational database compiled from the sources in Part 2. These analyses trace the development of language describing early hospitals and shelters, demonstrate the variety and degree of services they offered, explain the multi-tiered organization of their care providers along with the social statuses of their founders, map the spread of these institutions across three continents and argue for the wide availability. The results of these analyses are used to provide an economic, political, and theological answer, in conversation with contemporary scholarship on poverty in antiquity, to the questions of how these institutions were conceived by their founders and why they spread rapidly beginning in the fourth century. |
