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Book Review
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
| Nicholas Terpstra. Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna. (The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 123rd series, number 4.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 349. $50.00.
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| Hospital—shelter—foundling home—orphanage—convent—guild—factory—confraternity: these are protean entities that morph into each other, exchanging organizational models, sharing ideals and vision. Although the orphanage (for boys) and its sibling conservatory (for girls) are the main concern of Nicholas Terpstra's superbly executed study, author and reader trip over these cognate institutions in pursuit of the quarry. All were self-starting and autonomous, imposed by neither state nor church; they testify to the struggle by conscientious Italian Catholics of the Renaissance to manage social crises. They did so not at all badly, we might conclude from the richly detailed description of their operation that Terpstra provides, mined from the archives of multiple institutions, establishing a pattern for the provision of welfare services that other early modern societies could imitate. |
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Terpstra's investigation of the orphanage systems of Florence and Bologna considerably advances the inquiry into abandonment in the Renaissance that has been pursued by Philip Gavitt, Richard Trexler, Volker Hunecke, and Francesco Bianchi, looking at the foundling homes of Florence, Milan, and Padua, while Anne E. C. McCants, Thomas Max Safley, Joan Sherwood, C. K. Manzione, and Ruth McClure have brought the investigation to Amsterdam, Augsburg, Madrid, and London. The book relates as well to the study of youth confraternities by Konrad Eisenbichler and Lorenzo Polizzotto, and of women's communities by Sherrill Cohen, Jutta Sperling, and Sharon Strocchia, as well as to the history of childhood dissected in a stream of books flowing from the spring of Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of the Family (1962). |
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After an introductory chapter that admirably sums up what is known about Renaissance demographic crises and their impact on families, Terpstra walks the reader through the many aspects of orphanage creation and operation in Florence and Bologna over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A first chapter on "Opening A Home" shows how, in both cities, outbreaks of plague and accompanying disasters stimulated the creation by the 1550s of a network of multiple forms of houses to accommodate the children left "orphaned"—a term that includes those abandoned by their families, or bereft of one parent, as well as the "true orphans" who had lost both. |
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The next chapter explains how a child entered one of these homes, a process that often involved filling out an application and being interviewed by the board for clients were not foundlings abandoned at birth but in their middle or later childhood. The next two chapters survey the experience respectively of girls and boys in their different settings. The fifth chapter explores how these homes were managed, and the sixth considers to what destinies the former orphans were released, at around fourteen for boys and sixteen for girls (not a few died in the orphanage still young, while others stayed through old age), into the world. |
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