Created in 1606, the Chamber of Christian Charity was intended to fund pensions for former army officers and amputated soldiers by reviewing the operations and expropriating surplus revenues from local charitable foundations – abbeys, monasteries, hospices and local hospitals. This article explores the reasons behind Henri IV’s initiative and the new methods used – royal commissioners and a centralized approach – to try to resolve what was seen as a traditional problem of corruption and redundancy in French poor relief structures. It will analyse the difficulties encountered by the Chamber and the legal obstacles to the whole effort to intervene in local municipal and ecclesiastical institutions to show that the experiment never produced the anticipated results and was abandoned shortly after the king’s assassination in 1610.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Hickey, D., (2025), "Sixteenth Century Hospital Reform: Henri IV and the Chamber of Christian Charity", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Hickey, Daniel. "Sixteenth Century Hospital Reform: Henri IV and the Chamber of Christian Charity." Renaissance and Reformation 29 (4): 2010. 5-15. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v29i4.11442. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.