Book Review

With Us Always contains eleven essays on the history of social welfare in western Europe and the United States from the fifteenth century to the present. The editors aim to show the changing role of private charity in the era of public poor relief. Some of their contributors treat this theme more directly than others.	1
The European essays were commissioned to challenge the view that the secularization of poor relief began as early as the sixteenth century. The editors argue that the rise of public relief was not inherently secular because it served an ideal of community in common with religious charity. They find dichotomy only when French and English reformers began proposing regulation of the poor in the second half of the eighteenth century.	2
The Catholic material readily fits this model. Brian Pullan's essay on Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries demonstrates the mingling of religious and civic ideals in a prototypical urban setting. Kathryn Norberg and Thomas M. Adams show the vitality of Counter Reformation charity in seventeenth-century Grenoble and eighteenth-century Lyons.	. . .