Where do we find youths in the early modern world? Where did they find themselves? Often it was on the road or on the seas, in motion from home to some other place or places, and seldom entirely by choice. As we become more curious about global history and to seeing how early modern Europeans (ie., roughly 16th to 18th centuries) encountered the world and were shaped by it, we’re drawn to the intersections of this mobility with gender and with race. Much of what was new in early modern experience came first to and through young people, often as the involuntary agents of broader social and economic forces. In this lecture, I’ll focus first on a few individuals or groups of young people from different parts of the world who demonstrate some of these realities. I’ll then pull back and ask some broader questions about why it’s hard to capture and understand the experience of young people at that time, and also why looking more closely at these youths might reshape our understanding of the early modern period more generally.
Places are limited, so please confirm your attendance by emailing oceh@history.ox.ac.uk
About the Speaker: Dr. Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto
I am currently working on spatial and sensory history in the early modern period, particularly as regards intercommunal exchange and relations. This arises out of some recent work looking at historical backgrounds to the refugee crisis: Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: 2015), and Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures (Routledge: 2019). It also intersects with a larger project to digitally map social and spatial relations in sixteenth century Florence, known as the DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) project; see Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City (Routledge: 2016).
Beyond that, much of my work has been at the intersections of politics, gender, charity, and religion. Books include Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard: 2013) which won the Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association and the Ruth Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America; Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins: 2010); Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (Johns Hopkins: 2005); and Lay Confraternities and CivicnReligion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: 1995), which was awarded the Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies.
I have also edited a number of essay collections including: Renaissance Religions: Modes and Meanings in History (Brepols: 2021); Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy (Routledge: 2019); Faith's Boundaries: Laity & Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Brepols: 2012), The Art of Executing Well: Rituals of Execution in Renaissance Italy (Truman: 2008), The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: 2000). A primary source reader: Lives Uncovered: A Sourcebook of Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe was published with University of Toronto Press in 2019.
