Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence

by Nicholas Terpstra

In 1554, a group of idealistic laywomen founded a home for homeless and orphaned adolescent girls in one of the worst neighborhoods in Florence. Of the 526 girls who lived in the home during its fourteen-year tenure, only 202 left there alive. Struck by the unusually high mortality rate, Nicholas Terpstra sets out to determine what killed the lost girls of the House of Compassion shelter (Casa della Pietà). Reaching deep into the archives' letters, ledgers, and records from both inside and outside the home, he slowly pieces together the tragic story. The Casa welcomed girls in bad health and with little future, hoping to save them from an almost certain life of poverty and drudgery. Yet this "safe" house was cruelly dangerous. Victims of Renaissance Florence’s sexual politics, these young women were at the disposal of the city’s elite men, who treated them as property meant for their personal pleasure. With scholarly precision and journalistic style, Terpstra uncovers and chronicles a series of disturbing leads that point to possible reasons so many girls hints of routine abortions, basic medical care for sexually transmitted diseases, and appalling conditions in the textile factories where the girls worked. Church authorities eventually took the Casa della Pietà away from the women who had founded it and moved it to a better part of Florence. Its sordid past was hidden, until now, in an official history that bore little resemblance to the orphanage’s true origins. Terpstra’s meticulous investigation not only uncovers the sad fate of the lost girls of the Casa della Pietà but also explores broader themes, including gender relations, public health, church politics, and the challenges girls and adolescent women faced in Renaissance Florence.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Historical

264 pages, Hardcover

First published May 24, 2010

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

[Elena]

In 1554, a group of laywomen opened a home – eventually known as the Casa della Pietà – for orphaned and abandoned teenage girls in Florence. The Casa della Pietà is not, at first glance, unusual. Around the same time, similar institutions were opening across Florence, designed to shelter and protect vulnerable adolescent boys and girls. What is unusual is the Casa della Pietà’s death rate. Of the 52 girls registered on the Pietà’s opening day, over half were dead within months or even weeks of arriving. Even in the early modern era, this was an unusual and alarming statistic. What was killing the girls of the Casa della Pietà?
 
This is the mystery that drives Terpstra’s investigation. Written in a ‘journalist style’, each chapter takes us deeper into the puzzling mix of archival sources, silences, and secrets. Could over-work, abortions, prostitution, or even syphilis be killing the Pietà girls? Were their deaths deliberately concealed? How can we uncover the histories of lower-class, abandoned girls when their voices are absent from extant sources?
 
Terpstra’s style and structure make this a highly engaging and accessible history. It is refreshing to see a historian talk through the frustrations, gaps, and dead ends of archival research. Rather than presenting these as insurmountable problems, Terpstra allows the archive to structure his narrative, and guides the reader through his thought process as he explores each new avenue of inquiry. I enjoyed Terpstra’s explicit acknowledgement that ‘[h]istorians aim to base their analysis as much as possible on primary sources, and the history they write reflects the sources they chose to emphasise. At the same time, they write with a purpose and a sense of the broader story into which their own work falls. The purpose and broader story inevitably shapes how historians recognize, read, and fill the gaps between the lines – that is, how they interpret the period and subjects that documents don’t cover, or the context that they take for granted’ (p.177).
 
After five engrossing chapters, each of which explores a different theory and aspect of life at the Pietà, Terpstra ultimately concludes that ‘we cannot say for sure’ what was killing the Pietà girls but that ‘they died for reasons that had everything to do with their age, gender, and vulnerability as lower-class girls who had been abandoned by their families’ (p.182).
 
I found this an incredibly engaging and refreshing way to write history, especially those histories ‘cloaked in silences’ (p.182).

[Ella]

2.5 rounded down.
I really wanted to like this better than I did, but I can’t with an academic women’s history calling Catholic nuns clergy. They’re religious, but not clergy. They’re not ordained. (Also, my work focuses a few centuries before this, but I really want to check whether the groups he’s calling ‘nuns’ are in fact nuns. It’s likely, considering this is over 200 years after Periculoso and associated claustration policies, but I want to check). He’s also pretty off about the reasons lay penitents are associated with sex work, and about the chronology there, but I chalk this up to being a renaissance specialist/early modernist. Finally, I feel like there’s a lot of unsatisfying veering off all over everywhere after sometimes cool and sometimes tenuous conclusions.

On a more positive note, the work done on the role of these conservatories like the Pietà in the textile trade is absolutely fascinating. The conclusions with regards to death rates (happening likely because many residents were already sick on arrival) is pretty interesting too. And I also always appreciate when I find serious, non-patronising women’s history written by a man who’s clearly doing women’s history because it’s genuinely interesting history, not because he wants some kind of weird brownie points (I’ve read some shit, okay?). This shouldn’t be such a notable surprise, but it is and I’m pleased.

[María]

"Una visión filtrada por el cliché haría pensar en casos de abusos y prostitución, la orden del día en aquellas fechas (y en casi todas) pero quizás el gran atractivo del ensayo esté en la búsqueda de otros argumentos. Nicholas Terpstra, profesor de Historia en la Universidad de Toronto, maneja fuentes de primera y segunda mano, intercala fragmentos de anuarios, ilustraciones, mapas,cartas, canciones populares y recetarios que ayudan a pintar el cuadro de estas pobre chavalas de entre doce y diecisiete años acogidas ya maltrechas por pura caridad; en su mayoría, tras un tiempo en el centro encontraron una casa en la que trabajar como sirvientas o aprendices, otras fueron devueltas a sus familias y unas pocas se escaparon..."

(Extracto de la entrada original en www.lamanoqueescribeconpluma.com)

[Marina Rosa Moni]

A hard read because of detailed mentions of SA, but a very interesting look into foundling houses for girls in 16th century Florence. Around a cloud of mystery there's so much to read into the unsaid

[Jennifer]

This book is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of young lower class girls during the Renaissance and the politics and social structures that would define their lives.

[Linda Smee]

lots of information but mildly unsatisfying...not his fault...its just an unsolvable mystery