Mapping the Civic Roles of London’s Royal Hospitals through Digital Humanities
HIS350: Digital Approaches to Pre-Modern Europe Heather Smith Mingjingzi Liu Luna 1004542202 August 13th, 2025 I. Introduction of Royal Hospitals In early modern London, the term “hospital” did not simply mean a place for medical care but to multi-purpose institution that included charity, confinement, and correction (Simpson, 2022). During the Protestant Reformation, the City of London reorganized these institutions into the “royal hospitals” (Simpson, 2022). After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, Edward VI replaced their Catholic foundations with a Protestant system that tied assistance to moral discipline and placed them under civic governance (Simpson, 2022). Across Protestant Europe, the Reformation shifted the relief for the poor from church-run charity to civic institutions that offered aid to those deemed deserving and punished the “undeserving” (Cunningham and Grell 1997, 233). This paper uses digital humanities tools to analyze...
