| Abstract [eng] |
This research focuses on beggars, begging and various aspects of this phenomenon in the 18th century Vilnius. The first chapter is dedicated to the legislation of begging in the early modern Vilnius and Lithuania. The second chapter focuses on the ways in which beggars participated in other people’s lives, various almsgiving tendencies and their shifts as well as the discourse on begging in this period. The third chapter delves into the ways of how did the beggars’ organization function in practice. The fourth chapter focuses on beggars themselves: the causes of their poverty, age, gender, family status, places of origin, locations in the city where such people lived or gathered alms, circumstances of their deaths and funerary traditions, the dislocation of the poor that took place at the end of the 18th century. Even though the relationship between other people and beggars was ambiguous, opinions on some phenomena that were related to begging were rather equivocal and changed throughout time, beggars were an integral part of Vilnius society. Begging in Vilnius became unwanted and illegal only at the very end of the 18th century. This transformation was not welcomed by some beggars as witnessed by their attempts to escape the control of the authorities. |
