Renaissance Italians pioneered radical changes in ways of helping the poor, including orphanages, workhouses, pawnshops, and women’s shelters. Nicholas Terpstra shows that gender was the key factor driving innovation. Most of the recipients of charity were women. The most creative new plans focused on features of women’s poverty like illegitimate births, hunger, unemployment, and domestic violence. Signal features of the reforms, from forced labor to new instruments of saving and lending, ...

How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences and further shape them This Element takes an approach that is both global expansive and locally rooted by focusing on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colonialist experience from north to south, republican to monarchical, Catholic to Protestan...

Acompaña a Luna, una pequeña unicornio valiente, en un viaje mágico para descubrir los cinco elementos: Tierra, Aire, Agua, Fuego y Éter. A lo largo de su aventura, Luna conoce a adorables amigos elementales que le ofrecen regalos especiales y enseñanzas profundas. Juntos, aprenderán que cuando los elementos se unen, nace algo aún más poderoso: la amistad, la armonía y la magia del corazón.Una historia encantadora llena de colores, luz y ternura, perfecta para niños y niñas que sue...

The religious refugee first emerged as a mass phenomenon in the late fifteenth century. Over the following two and a half centuries, millions of Jews, Muslims, and Christians were forced from their homes and into temporary or permanent exile. Their migrations across Europe and around the globe shaped the early modern world and profoundly affected literature, art, and culture. Economic and political factors drove many expulsions, but religion was the factor most commonly used to justify the...

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 ins...

In the early development of the modern Italian state, individual orphanages were a reflection of the intertwining of politics and charity.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 ...

Join Luna, a bright-eyed baby unicorn, as she embarks on a journey across magical landscapes to find the fifth and most powerful element. Along the way, Luna meets new friends who embody Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and learns the value of balance, kindness, and intuition. A story of wonder, connection, and imagination—perfect for bedtime or classroom story time.Luna the Little Unicorn and the Quest for the Fifth Element inspires children to connect with nature and believe in their...

Join Luna, a bright-eyed baby unicorn, as she embarks on a journey across magical landscapes to find the fifth and most powerful element. Along the way, Luna meets new friends who embody Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and learns the value of balance, kindness, and intuition. A story of wonder, connection, and imagination-perfect for bedtime or classroom story time.Luna the Little Unicorn and the Quest for the Fifth Element inspires children to connect with nature and believe...

Redreaming the Renaissance seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the textual world of the Italian Renaissance as proving ground. In this volume, these disciplines blur, as they did for early moderns, who did not always distinguish between the historical and literary significance of the texts they read ...

“The Francis Effect was about proposing something completely absurd, as absurd as borders are. If Immigrant Movement was for the thousands of people who went there, The The Francis Effect was just for one person, the pope. But the more people that participated, the more personal it became.” –Tania BrugueraStemming from a performance that originated at the Guggenheim Museum, The Francis Effect explores Tania Bruguera’s work as an artist, activist, and Cuban immigrant to the...

Curated by acclaimed scholar Nicholas Terpstra, Lives Uncovered is a captivating collection of early modern primary sources organized around the human life cycle. The collection begins with a short essay titled "How to Read a Primary Source," which helps readers recognize different kinds of primary sources and introduces the idea of critical reading. A second brief essay, "Life Cycles in the Early Modern Period," details the organization of the volume and explains each stage in th...

Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence explores the potential of digital mapping or Historical GIS as a research and teaching tool to enable researchers and students to uncover the spatial, kinetic and sensory dimensions of the early modern city.The exploration focuses on new digital research and mapping projects that engage the rich social, cultural, and artistic life of Florence in particular. One is a new GIS tool known as DECIMA, (Digitally-Encoded Census Infor...