Abstract
During he sixteenth century the establishment of public and private welfare institutions for the care of the needy puerperae increased in the Reformed world as well as in the Catholic states. This new spread of welfare institutions is due to a new attention to the family, conceived as the basic centre of religious and civil education, and to the deep changes in the public assistance, which bereft many social categories of their traditional subsidies. Women were particularly injured by these changes because of their economic precariousness, made worse by the pregnancy. In this work I study different cases in Europe: Lyon, Nürnberg, Florence and the welfare institutions of Basel, where developed the activity of the von Wissenburgsstiftung and that of the newly founded Erasmusstiftung.
