Showing papers by "Philip T. Hoffman published in 1981"
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employed maximum likelihood methods to analyze the increase in pious bequests in early modern French wills and found that at any level of wealth, pious bequesques rose over the course of the seventeenth century and that the increase was most pronounced among the literate and women.
Abstract: This paper employs maximum likelihood methods to analyze the increase in pious bequests in early modern French wills Other historians have described the rise of pious bequests in wills, but no one has used multivariate statistical methods to explain the phenomenon It turns out that at any level of wealth pious bequests rose over the course of the seventeenth century and that the bequests were most pronounced among the literate and women The paper argues that the increase in pious bequests was mark of growing support for the Counter Reformation, which attracted an inordinate number of supporters in educated circles and in the female population