Space, Assistance, and Material Culture: Discussing Marginality in Barcelona’s Hospital de la Santa Creu during the Fifteenth Century
This poster presents research findings related to patients at the Hospital de la Santa Creu in Barcelona, including their origins, employment, material culture, and support networks during the fifteenth century. In contrast to the conventional understanding that only the poor and marginalized turned to hospitals in medieval Europe, this research shows substantial differentiation among hospitals. Because Barcelona was a Mediterranean port and the nerve center of a large territory, patients of heterogeneous social-economic circumstances relied on this hospital’s support networks. These factors allowed for the extension of support networks into diverse and distant geographic spaces that reached sailors, slaves, prostitutes, and captives from far-flung places, as well as widows, galiotes, urban tradesmen from Barcelona, and peasants from nearby villages. Derived from the exhaustive analysis of documents and the use of geographic tools such as GIS, these findings are the product of a collaborative dialogue between history and other disciplines—a central topic of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the AHA.
This research offers crucial elements with which to discuss the poverty and marginality of the hospital’s patients. Moreover, by including a spatial dimension, it opens new analytical possibilities. This hospital thus becomes a window through which to observe relationships between this Mediterranean port and other lands. The study of patients allows us to examine the intersection of economic, aid, and subsistence networks within the heterogeneous and dynamic space of Barcelona. The objects, clothing, and other aspects of patients’ material culture demonstrate that not all the ill, in this hospital at least, were poor and marginalized.
This poster, together with an accompanying text, includes images, tables, and GIS-generated maps. These elements facilitate interaction with the public. Since the poster addresses a wide array of issues and builds upon the complementarity of history and geography, it will be of interest to specialists in Medieval history, the history of hospitals, material culture, and migration, as well as to digital history scholars who employ tools such as GIS.