Hospitals and Hospital Workers in the Late Middle Ages: Personal and Credit Relationships in Two Northern Italian Case Studies

The chapter examines two different cases in late medieval Italy regarding the relationship between hospitals and their employees and the notion that hospital managers and employees had of themselves and the hospital enterprise. It begins with a brief overview of information available in court documents concerning a dependency on the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala di Siena in Val d'Orcia. It then enters into details of rural accounting records of the hospital of Sant'Andrea in Vercelli, placing particular emphasis on credit relations between peasant employees and the hospital.