Archival Study Links Women to Naples Charity’s Institutional Memory

An archival study of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a charitable institution founded in Naples in 1602, finds that women helped shape its welfare activities, governance and institutional identity through financial contributions, informal influence and stories preserved in its records. The research focuses on women’s “narrative capital,” a concept associated with Bruni (2018) and Reading (2019) concerning the transformative power of stories in shaping identity, collective memory and institutions.

The study examines the Pio Monte’s Dame Benefattrici, or female benefactors, many of whom belonged to the Neapolitan aristocracy. These women contributed financially and exerted informal influence within an institution that provided dowries and other forms of charitable assistance to vulnerable women. The available article abstract does not provide a quantitative estimate of their giving, identify the number of women studied or offer a controlled comparison with male benefactors. It instead presents a qualitative, archival interpretation of how women participated in welfare, governance and wealth redistribution.

According to the research, women’s narrative capital was co-constituted by two interconnected registers. The first was an authorial or curatorial voice, exemplified by Teresa Filangieri’s Storia della carità napoletana, published in 1875. The second was a distributed or inscriptive infrastructure embedded in dowry records, wills, donation registers and institutional deliberations published while the Pio Monte was in operation. Filangieri’s narrative legitimized the institutional records, while those records provided the experiential and ethical foundation that gave the narrative historical depth.

The study combines microhistory, gender history, narrative studies and archival analysis to reinterpret authored accounts and administrative traces as related forms of evidence. Its scope is historical and interpretive rather than experimental: it uses records associated with one charitable institution to illuminate women’s economic experiences and collective practices of care. Within the evidence summarized in the abstract, the central finding is that women’s financial contributions, informal influence and documentary presence were connected to the production of social trust, redistribution and institutional legitimacy. The preview does not reveal the full set of archival cases, the study’s date range or numerical findings, so the breadth and scale of those contributions cannot be independently assessed from the supplied material.

Subject of Research: Archival research on women’s narrative capital and institutional memory at the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples.

Article Title: Recovering women’s narrative capital: institutional memory and archival perspectives from the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples

Article References: Gioeli, G. (2026). Recovering women’s narrative capital: institutional memory and archival perspectives from the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples. International Review of Economics, 73(2), Article 42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00553-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00553-x

Keywords: narrative capital, institutional memory, women benefactors, charitable institutions, Naples, archival history, gender history, welfare history, microhistory, collective memory, Recovering, women