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This chapter analyzes the social world from which the new female communities grew and gained support. It details the emergence of four social groups (a non-knighted aristocracy, women, secular canons, and a bourgeoisie) at the same moment that the women's religious movement took shape in Champagne and began to coalesce as Cistercian nunneries. These two events—one sociological in nature and the other religious—were intimately bound. Although the daughters and sisters of townsmen formed the initial groups of mulieres religiosae who would be re-formed as nuns, within a generation the Cistercian nunneries received rents, houses, and income that entangled them in this same changing economic and social world. In turn, as nuns the women prayed and labored for the redemption of these new social groups. The patronage of Cistercian nunneries enhanced the social capital and reinforced networks of the same townsmen and women, just as bonds of kinship and shared social space tied the nuns to the urban milieu and the ideals of the vita apostolica or the embrace of poverty, charity, and penitential piety. What is even more striking, however, is that patronage of the new Cistercian nunneries had the effect of uniting these new social groups with the traditional knightly and baronial aristocracy, who had deep ties to the Cistercian order, creating a community of patrons allied in their combined support for the nuns.

This chapter examines the role of the counts and countesses in the provision of charity. While the counts' patronage of religious institutions has been studied, far less attention has been paid to their patronage of hospitals. Did they regard hospitals as simply another religious institution in need of support, or were there distinctive elements in their relationship to these charitable institutions, a number of which the counts had founded and which remained under their jurisdiction? The same question can be asked of Champagne's aristocracy, known for its benefaction of monastic houses, but which also showed a “compulsion for provisioning the poor and sick.” Champagne's increasingly influential urban bourgeoisie also played a prominent role in bequests to hospitals and in other economic transactions with these institutions. The chapter then looks at the relationship between Champagne's hospitals and other ecclesiastical institutions, such as monasteries, chapters, and cathedrals. Given that the county was such an important center for monastic life, particularly reformed monasticism, there is a need to consider the impact that monasteries may have had in supporting or eclipsing the provision of charity in hospitals. Scholars of medieval religious institutions have not examined the central role that these charitable institutions played, both in the larger religious and institutional landscape and in the urban economy.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of recreational birdwatching, an activity of finding, noting, and recording birds by species, often with an emphasis on quantifiable personal achievement. Its practitioners are members of the urban bourgeoisie who were estranged from their forebears' vernacular knowledge yet sought out an experience of nature. Recreational birding grew out of ornithology. Through much of the twentieth century there was a continuum between leading ornithologists and gentlemen who wrote for local natural history journals. As ornithology was professionalized and as multitudes of people have developed a more casual interest in birds, the two traditions have moved apart. Recreational birdwatching in late twentieth-century Africa was distinguished from the rest of the world by being the pursuit of the Euro-African minority and expatriates.