The Poverty Plateau: The Space of the Urban Street Poor in Early Christian Literature

The city street is a thick territory made of superposed plans of existence with only a few passages inbetween – whether these are visual, olfactory, or interactional contact zones. As universal urban agents transiently sharing one of these in-between zones, beggars and almsgivers are also urban types that span the history of the inter-spatiality between the city of the rich and the city of the poor. Such history has a critical turning point which dates back to early Christ religion and the related urban textual production. The aim of this paper is to sift through the early three centuries of early Christian literature in order to blend together the notion of co-spatiality and the figure of the urban street poor and see what happens. The paper will show how and to what extent changes and breakthroughs in the social imagination of beggarly poverty correlate with the perception of di􀀂erent spatialities simultaneously situated in the same street spot. The display of the destitute goes hand in hand with the reappraisal of the layered quality of the street.