Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna

by Nicholas Terpstra

Nearly half of the children who lived in the cities of the late Italian Renaissance were under fifteen years of age. Grinding poverty, unstable families, and the death of a parent could make caring for these young children a burden. Many were abandoned, others orphaned. At a time when political rulers fashioned themselves as the "fathers" of society, these cast-off children presented a very immediate challenge and opportunity.

In Bologna and Florence, government and private institutions pioneered orphanages to care for the growing number of homeless children. Nicholas Terpstra discusses the founding and management of these institutions, the procedures for placing children into them, the children's daily routine and education, and finally their departure from these homes. He explores the role of the city-state and considers why Bologna and Florence took different paths in operating the orphanages. Terpstra finds that Bologna's orphanages were better run, looked after the children more effectively, and were more successful in returning their wards to society as productive members of the city's economy. Florence's orphanages were larger and harsher, and made little attempt to reintegrate children into society.

Based on extensive archival research and individual stories, Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance demonstrates how gender and class shaped individual orphanages in each city's network, and how politics, charity, and economics intertwined in the development of the early modern state.

Genres: History, Italy

368 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 2005

About the author

Nicholas Terpstra (University of Toronto) is author of Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (1995), which won the Howard K. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and the editor of The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (2000).

Reviews

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read January 7-8, 2010. Compares the institutions for abandoned children (using "abandoned" loosely) in Florence and Bologna in the sixteenth century: how one might enter such an institution (be it a foundling hospital, an orphanage, or conservatory), how children were treated once there, and who ran these institutions, to what end.

Argues that the networks in which these institutions were bound differed between Florence and Bologna based on differences in their local traditions and culture. Florence, being a duchy after 1537, ran a sprawling yet highly centralized, bureaucratic network of such institutions, which reached out to any and all subjects of the Florentine state. This made for larger, less personal institutions, which adversely affected the kind of care children could expect to receive. By contrast, Bologna's institutions (reflecting its republican past and papal oligarchical present) were much smaller and allowed for a closer personal engagement between patrons and clients, who were all citizens or children of citizens, and who could expect a strong sense of surrogacy within their home, which in turn made for stronger connections outside the home and a better chance of ever leaving it.

In a broader context, argues that approaches to charity varied across Europe not by confession, but by local traditions and culture, and by the political ends that charity was meant to serve as a result of those traditions and culture. Florence had one of the first fully articulated networks of rational, bureaucratic charity, despite having a strongly Catholic and ecclesiastical civic religion -- which has heretofore been argued to be incompatible with a functional or rational state bureaucracy.

Also contains one of the most depressing statistics ever: of the 1,459 infants that were abandoned to a foundling home in Modica, Sicily between 1873 and 1883, only three survived to adulthood (p. 20). Thanks for that uplifting tidbit, Terpstra. I appreciate it.

[Mathew Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am strapped for time, but I must say this book provided an intriguing aspect to the history of orphaned children in Europe. I like the way Terpstra uses the differences between Bologona and Florence to detail the overall ideologies of gender, politics, economy, etc. It's truly a fascinating study and well done. My only two issues with it involves the sometimes dry nature of the writing, itself and the mention of oblation in the intro that adheres the the Boswellian thesis -- a highly debated, if not normally debunked, theory as a form of abandonment. But, these are only things to quibble over --if that. Enjoyed it immensely.