York University

The work undertaken during the course of this Small Grant will contribute towards my project, Cultures of Care in Early Modern Scotland: the first assessment of the Reformations impact on the practice and understanding of parochialism care giving. The project is much more than another exploration of statutory, regulated, poor relief. Rather, it looks for the less formal, familial and neighbourly, networks of care that proliferated early modern society. My aims are, on the one hand, to assess how voluntary care networks were constituted and how they interacted with secular and ecclesiastical authority and, on the other, to understand how disability and medical requirements were categorised by communities. The Small Grant will allow the Investigator to assess the surviving archival material of four charitable bodies in seventeenth-century Scotland: The Mariners Society of Ayr; the Orphan Hospital Manufactory and Pauls work, Edinburgh; Trinity College Hospital, Edinburgh and Trinity H ouse, Leith. This work will take six days and involve travel to Edinburgh to visit the National Archives of Scotland and Edinburgh City Archives.