Domingo de Soto and itinerant poverty: A mobile concept

In his Deliberation on the Cause of the Poor of 1545, the Dominican theologian Domingo de Soto criticised the Spanish Poor Law of 1540, condemning measures that restricted public begging and excluded the foreign poor. Soto addressed poverty through the eyes of a Christian – and Counter-Reformation – thinker, but also through a great understanding of the huge benefits of geographical mobility for poor relief. His defence of the right and freedom to move around whenever poverty stroke echoed a decentralised approach to charity which was only fully reformed in the nineteenth century. This chapter incorporates some of the social and cultural practices present in Soto’s insights on the multi-dimensional nature of poverty and its connection to itinerant behaviour. Shifting the attention away from already available discussions on the role of theological perspectives and political and economic frameworks, it focuses on the Dominican’s contributions to the underlying conceptual history of poor relief, underscoring his unusual approach to poverty as both an itinerant concept and practice. This chapter argues that Soto’s defiance of the poor’s deserving–undeserving dichotomy was far more radical than what scholars have previously assumed, and his emphasis on human beings’ impermanent condition has an enormous legacy for our own understanding of poverty as a concept in constant motion.