Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence (review)

This book is a page-turning mystery that employs to great effect the historical method envisioned by Carlo Ginzburg in ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’ (History Workshop Journal 9:1 (1980), 6–36). Like Sherlock Holmes, Nicholas Terpstra searches for clues to solve a series of puzzles.

The story whose mysteries the author tries to solve begins in 1554, with the founding of the Casa della Pietà, a home established by a group of Florentine charitable women to shelter girls orphaned or abandoned because of famine and the epidemics that followed until they could return to their families or accumulate a small dowry that would help them avoid prostitution and enter marriage to a working-class husband. The Pietà became a veritable premodern factory for spinning wool and weaving it into cloth as well as processing cocoons into raw silk. To give a sense of the size of the operation, Terpstra notes that within three years of opening, the income from spinning and weaving wool brought in as much as the earnings of about fifteen professional wool weavers. In 1565, the girls of the Pietà also processed almost 1,200 pounds of silk drawn from millions of cocoons that fed on tons of mulberry leaves. Girls not working in textiles were sent out as live-in servants, often returning soon after either because their employers could not afford them or because of disagreements, which in some cases undoubtedly involved sexual abuse. Those too young for these occupations, and therefore deemed (incorrectly) too young to be sexual prey, were sent out on the streets to beg for alms. These activities and the charitable donations of the founders and their friends kept the institution afloat, but barely, for fourteen years. The story ends when in the wake of the Council of Trent, male religious reformers curbed the activities of the girls and the women who oversaw them, relocated the Pietà to a more secluded and upscale part of the city, and converted it into a conventional conservatory housing better-off girls, many of whom became nuns.

Terpstra tells this story with a gimlet eye for the ironies of Florentine society (the use of ‘the wages of sin’ to pay institutions that would keep women from falling into sin) and with a good sense of where to place responsibility for its shortcomings (Florentines blamed poor unmarried mothers for the death and abandonment of infants and children, but ‘it was in fact fathers’ failure to recognize and support these infants that led to their abandonment’). Yet he also has enormous sympathy for his subjects, particularly for the girls of the Pietà, without romanticizing them or losing his sense of humour, as when discussing laundresses who may have laundered the financial books of the institution as well the clothes they washed.

In the process of telling us about the Casa della Pietà, Terpstra sheds light on the wider social mechanisms that linked the economy, politics, and society of Renaissance Florence to each other. Through the lens of the Pietà we learn about the birth and death of girls in Renaissance Florence, medical practices and disease, the political economy of marriage, gender relations, the lives of the working poor, religious beliefs, and church-state relations. We also learn about the historian’s craft. For this book lays out the working process of the historian as he sifts through the evidence, ponders its accuracy, wonders why some of it has disappeared and why some of it, seemingly accurate, on closer inspection turns out to border on fiction. For readers interested in solving problems yet comfortable accepting that only some have solutions, for those interested in conveying the excitement and fun of historical discovery, and for those who like to approach structural issues via the individuals whose lives were affected by them, this is the book for you.

Among the interesting questions Terpstra asks in this captivating book are: Why in Renaissance Florence, where almost everyone knew everyone...