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

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

The Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science 4. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiv + 350 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $90. ISBN: 0-8018-8184-6.

Readers hoping to find the roots of enlightened social policy in early modern charity will be quite disillusioned after reading this elegantly written and lively tale of two cities' orphanages (for boys) and conservatories (for girls). Comparing Florence and Bologna is rather like trying to assess educational quality by comparing public and private schools: private schools deliver better results, but manage to do so partially because they choose whom to admit and whom to exclude. So in these cases Bologna's orphanages and conservatories were more selective, provided better care, and produced better outcomes altogether. Although Florentine orphanages and conservatories had many of the same statutes and provisions as their counterparts in Bologna, they were observed more in the breach.

The differences, Terpstra argues, can be explained by the charitable and political cultures of each city. Although both cities were similar in size, and both cities had longstanding involvement of their local confraternities in charitable practice, Bologna's subservient position to the Papal States assumed a somewhat suspicious and resentful distance that pushed charitable institutions toward greater lay and noble patronage, more along the lines of what Sandra Cavallo has shown was the case in early modern Turin. Florentine charitable practice, by contrast, reflected the close ties between the papacy and Florence, not only in the period of Medici popes, but well into the sixteenth century. In particular, the way in which the papacy of Clement VII shaped Florence's transition from republic to grand duchy also influenced the new regime's response to the Savonarolan movement, a movement that until the accession of Duke Alessandro in 1532 held several major charitable institutions in its firm grip. The relationship between charity and politics could be lethal both for politically suspect reformers and for the children themselves. The differences between charitable cultures affected girls more profoundly than boys: the graduates of conservatories in Bologna had a much better chance of eventually leaving their institutions via dowry and marriage. Only death, and often premature death at that, provided the escape for most Florentine girls from institutional care. As Florentine institutions came increasingly under clerical control, conservatories morphed into convents. Bolognese conservatories seem to have functioned as deliberately temporary solutions for a much higher class of abandoning parent.

Certainly one of Terpstra's most striking findings is the high rate of mortality for girls in Florence, especially at the hospital of the Pieta. Although Terpstra speculates that such mortality rates were likely due to congenital syphilis, the girls of the Pieta themselves, as Lucia Sandri has pointed out, had quite a different explanation: the extremely heavy workloads involved in making silk brocades and other products for the grand duke, and resulting catarrh and other symptoms, including blindness. Certainly the latter explanation fits both Terpstra's hypothesis and his characterization of the political culture of the grand duchy, where charity always came at the price of involuntarily supporting the grand dukes' ambitious plans for dynastic and economic consolidation.

Although this book provides ample opportunity for students of social welfare policy to reflect on the impermeability of social problems to virtually any solution, the book's greatest strength is the author's historical imagination in recapturing the details of how children themselves experienced homelessness and institutionalization. The early and late chapters form a sort of contextual parenthesis around the middle chapters that variously describe the career paths of boys and girls, with vivid illustrations of particular cases cast in the present, or as appropriate, the conditional tense.

The boundaries of this study are tight and clear, yet leave the reader wondering to what extent these experiences were representative for the larger groups of children that were actually abandoned. At most, the conservatories and orphanages cared for 500 children of each city at any one time, whereas in Florence, at least, 1,400 or more girls lived under institutional but quasi-conventual care, and a far larger number of girls lived in serbanza in the city's convents. In both cities it is clear that the criteria for inclusion did not represent the most desperate circumstances abandoned children could face. Rather surprising is the author's decision not to engage at some level with the thesis of David Kertzer's Sacrificed for Honor, which attempts an explanation for the phenomenon of abandonment along confessional lines. Moreover, one might have wished for an analysis of how institutions that were not traditionally meant for charitable purposes, such as convents and third-order hospitals like that of San Paolo dei Convalescenti in Florence, but which nonetheless also figured into family strategies for preserving lineage and social position, subtly altered the dynamics of admissions and exits to and from orphanages and conservatories.

Indeed, the perils of classifying institutions into small-scale versus large-scale, tightly-controlled conservatories and orphanages versus "indiscriminate" and deadly foundling hospitals--ideal types, in short--often belie what such institutions had in common. For those lucky few to survive Florence's Innocenti, for example, some girls were learning to read and write and were studying with physicians, and at least two boys had illustrious clerical careers. Moreover, differences of status did not so easily divide along institutional lines. In a single institution, be it orphanage, conservatory, convent, or foundling hospital, inmates of higher social status enjoyed markedly more individual attention and preferential treatment. Certainly this also underscores Terpstra's observation that despite an egalitarian language of kinship, "this was still a society more accustomed to thinking vertically than horizontally" (2).

Although this reader would wish to qualify the dubious notion near the beginning of the book that would see in the evolution of these institutions the forerunners of the Dickensian orphanage and the modern prison, this book is nonetheless a model blend of historical imagination, vivid and engaging writing, and careful scholarship. Both the statistical and anecdotal evidence clarify but do not intrude. Terpstra's succinct introduction to the pressures and vicissitudes of Renaissance Italian family life is the most illuminating and balanced account to date, and unlikely to be surpassed any time soon. The author wisely avoids unproductive debates about whether childhood was better or worse then than now. Instead, in his painstaking reconstruction of their experience, he allows the children to speak for themselves with matchless eloquence.

PHILIP GAVITT

Saint Louis University